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Grassroots market-making: the production, policing and politics of value in Los Angeles’ transforming cannabis industry

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Grassroots Market-Making:
The Production, Policing and Politics of Value
in Los Angeles’ Transforming Cannabis Industry

by

Robert Chlala

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Sociology

August 2021

Copyright 2021 Robert Chlala
ii
Epigraph

Los Angeles is a city pregnant with future, a city where, in the words of one writer, you can set
new precedents with your own energy and creativity…
Los Angeles, it is critical for you now to directly perceive the web of life that binds all people!
Buddhism describes the connective threads of dependent origination.
Nothing in this world exists alone; everything comes into being, and continues in response to
causes and conditions.
This profound understanding of coexistence, of symbiosis—
here is the source of resolution for the most pressing and fundamental issues
that confront humankind in the chaotic last years of this century.
The Buddhist scriptures include the parable of “Two Bundles of Reeds,”
aptly demonstrating this relation of dependent origination.
Only by supporting each other can the two bundles stand straight—
if one is removed, the other must fall.
Because this exists, so does that;
Because that exists, so does this.
…
People can only live fully by helping others to live

Daisaku Ikeda. Sun of Jiyu Over a New Land.
Jan 27, 1993

When we observe the local community in a careful and ordered manner, we can discover that
there is an infinite array of materials for study and learning. The conditions of vast expanses of
heaven and earth are largely revealed in even the tiniest plot of land.

Tsunesaburo Makaguchi, Geography of Human Life (1903)

I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?

Naomi Shihab Nye. “Blood.” 1995.

iii
Dedication

To Javier Valles, who made the desert bloom

To Ray Javier Junior Valles, who never stopped learning

To Raouf Chlala, whose memory I carry and legacy I live

To Endica, who I know is running free.

To those who transitioned in the war on drugs, in the HIV/AIDS crises, in the wars waged on the
other – who refused to be stripped of power or joy and who fought for our future.

iv
Acknowledgements

This project relied upon the compassion, wisdom and courage of so many, each so generous that
I could never come close to summarizing their support. This project belongs to the millions of
people who could not survive to tell their story, who lost their lives and livelihoods to the war on
drugs, to the war on queer life, to the prison, and to the violence of exploited labor. This project
belongs to the ones who fought with the courage of lions to tear down prison walls, to plant in
the shadows of carceral California, to spread medicine that could sustain and improve life, to
organize and imagine Black, indigenous, brown and queer futures, to generate shared
possibilities, and to lift up the dignity of labor.
This dissertation was made possible by the generosity of the United Food and Commercial
Workers Local 770, including Rigo Valdez and Jean Tong, as well as Clara, Kevin, Jess, Eric,
Berta, Chato, Reina, Margo, Kathy and John. It was a labor of constant collaboration from my
sister Felicia, and of course Cat, Eunisses, Toni, Adam, Torie, Kristen, Kim, and far too many
other workers and fierce organizers who, if I named here, would ruin the confidentiality part!
I am grateful to the financial support of USC’s Equity Research Institute (ERI); the Archie Green
Fund for Labor Culture and History, Jack Henning Graduate Fellowship; the USC Joint
Educational Program - Dick Cone Award for Graduate Engaged Scholarship; the American
Association of Geographers, Urban Geography Specialty Group, Socialist & Critical Geography
Specialty Group and Queer and Trans Geographies Specialty Group.
I owe tremendous thanks to so many:
My advisor Manuel Pastor: thank you for giving me a chance to grow, offering me the
opportunities of a lifetime to bring together my social justice work and research at ERI, teaching
what it means to be a responsible scholar acting in the world, and supporting even if I was very
v
good at doing nothing as expected, on time or other things that involved having to be in my
corner more than a few times.
Juan de Lara, thank you for the gift of geography and LA, for your patience and for allowing me
to reach across new horizons of theory.
Leland Saito, thank you for your commitment to every student you encounter, for being the kind
of professor that sparks classroom dialogue without pretention and asking little recognition.
Vanessa Massaro, thank you for listening and treating me like a colleague, for offering so much
time and wisdom to make my first publication a reality, and for continuing to do so with so much
kindness even as you have so many other things more deserving of your attention.
Stachelle Overland, your true humanity and endless hours of compassionate support are the
reason so many of us – myself included - stay the course and don’t slam up on the rocks.
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, thank you for not allowing me to make excuses and for kicking off
this wild ride with your love of ethnography and enthusiasm for labor, plants and life.
Veronica Terríquez, thank you for being a model of justice and scholarship, for offering support
from day one and for helping create place for me in sociology and social science.
Carolyn Choi, Chelsea Johnson, Jennifer Candipan, and April Hovav. I had never thought in my
wildest dreams that I would get a cohort that would not only be compassionate and supportive,
but also be down to take on the world even when it meant risking so much. Carolyn, I feel so
fortunate to have had you there for the whole ride, always encouraging, elucidating and
enlivening me and literally helping me never give up. I know this is just our latest lifetime as
Buddha-fam fighting together for world peace (and infinite to come.) To our honorary cohort-
sisters, LaToya Deneece, May Lin, Karina Santanello, Becka Garrison, Blanca Ramirez, I count
myself lucky to learn from each of you.
vi
If it were not for PERE/CSII/ERI, most especially Madeline Wander and Jennifer Ito and of
course, Rhonda Ortiz, Eunice Valerde, Lauren Portillo, Jamie Flores, Kim Tabari, who help run
the show, I would not have a real home on campus and would have thrown in the towel long ago.
The most significant gift at ERI were life-long friends: Walter, Pam, Gladys, Edward, Heddy,
Sheila(s), Victor, Magaly, Natalie, Preston, Maya, Alejandro, Caro, Dalia, Cynthia, Matt, Thai,
and so many more who were also amazing team-mates and inspired me along the way.
To Caroline Faria and Jill Williams, thank you for letting me learn to be a better feminist
geographer and building spaces of dialogue and camaraderie. I am so fortunate to have come
across the queer geography fam we are building, including Debanuj, Eddie, Juan, Diego, Lorena,
Oscar, Hafsa, Rae, Julian, Jack, Derek. Thank you to Ananya Roy, who sparked a passion for the
city and theory, and to Christina Heatherton, who helped me first explore these ideas in so many
conversations, in another crisis and time. Gratzi to Micaela di Leonardo for the steady, profound
encouragement. Thank you, Kristie, Valdez-Guillen for being a fierce midwife to my first
chapter and for your many dialogues.
Thank you to the brilliant undergrads I had the privilege of sitting in conversation with who
continue to break boundaries, not the least of which includex Luna, Xavier, Diego, and Liye.
Thank you to Preeti, Eric, and other writing crew guest stars that kept me trying to sit down even
when I was restless,and who always kept it real. My deepest appreciation to Stefanie, Francisco,
Gabriel, Manisha, Meymuna, Shukry, Mo, Melinna, Claudia, Jenn, Lo, Emy, Shola, Matt, Owen,
Asli, Maya, Tuti, and many true friends who asked, who listened, and who encouraged even
when PhD-talk was so boring, not only in LA, but across the last few miles in the East Coast.
Thanks to true friend-comrades, Claire, Karlynne, Sean, Muriel, Tom, Sean, Jake and every other
GSOC-er fighting on to get the union we deserve, moving USC (Forward).
vii
To my local Buddhist districts, from Chicago to Downtown LA to Providence to New York, and
across the Culture Department, I have infinite gratitude for the home you have offered me and
determination you have fueled.
Billy, thank you for constantly pushing my creativity; thank you to the garden and to Hared,
Mario, Edward for showing up again and again.
Thank you to Miguel, the brother I always needed, and thank you to Azu, Emily, fam-friends
deeper blue than indigo.
Thank you Redgi for infinite lifetimes worth of friendship, in each one always ensuring I
imagine a new horizon. Matilda Stubbs, I wouldn’t even have considered getting back into this
groove if it wasn’t for you and for all the laughter along the way, and for my favorite little dude
and godson, Coz.
Thank you to Valerie (and Enrique) for your connection and compassion, for not flinching to call
me family. Your light is a real reflection of your Papi. And for your mom, I always will be down
for panecito & cafecito with her.
To my parents, Salwa and Elias, mon appréciation est aussi infinie que les étoiles. To Youmna,
Neda, Lamia, Ken and Jim, there isn’t a step on the way that I didn’t want to I want to win for
you. To my cousins, nieces and nephews, bio and extended, there’s isn’t a day I won’t stop
fighting for you.
Habib’albeh, Darío Valles: all the words in the universe could not cover my appreciation for you
and for Nightcrawler and St Louis, the truest company, Boddhisatvas never disparaging and
superior practice.
And of course to this plant and all it carries in a single spark, and to the Tongva caretakers of the
land where it flourishes and where I found myself at the crossroads of crises, war, and hope.
viii
Table of Contents

Epigraph .......................................................................................................................................... ii
Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... iii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iv
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................ viii
List of Tables .................................................................................................................................. ix
List of Figures .................................................................................................................................. x
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... xi
Chapter 1: Making Cannabis Essential (An Introduction) .............................................................. 1
Chapter 2: Movements and the Making of Fugitive Plants .......................................................... 34
Chapter 3: Relational Labor at the Roots ...................................................................................... 79
Chapter 4: Everyday Experiments in Endocannabinoids ............................................................ 119
Chapter 5: Losing Ground on the Green Mile ............................................................................. 172
Chapter 6: Reparations, Reinvestment and the Rush of Global Capital ...................................... 213
Conclusion: “I Ask Them to Remember” ................................................................................... 286
References ................................................................................................................................... 298
Appendix ..................................................................................................................................... 325

ix

List of Tables

Table 1: Project Interviewees - Page 72

x
List of Figures

Figure 1: Social Equity Maps – Cannabis Arrest Counts by Police Reporting District. Produced
by Amec Foster Wheeler and provided to the public via the City of LA Chief Legislative Analyst
Office. – Page 233

Figure 1: Social Equity Maps – Low Income Households by Police Reporting District. Produced
by Amec Foster Wheeler and provided to the public via the City of LA Chief Legislative Analyst
Office. - Page 234

xi
Abstract

By the eve of the legal opening of California’s recreational cannabis industry in 2018, Los
Angeles (Tonga lands) emerged as the largest retail cannabis and indoor cultivation sectors in the
US. What accounts for this radical regional expansion, and how did political and regulatory
shifts transform the market? Through an immersive, five-year ethnography, including more than
75 in-depth interviews, this dissertation turns a feminist, Black radical and regional geographic
lens on how cannabis workers, owner-operators, and patients generated multiple forms of value
that dramatically expanded the scale and scope of Los Angeles medical marijuana market from
2008 to 2020. I situate the market in a plantation landscape in Los Angeles dominated by real
estate speculation, policing-as-policy, fragile ethnic entrepreneurship and exploitative gendered
service labor, shaped by the racialized restructuring of the Great Recession. Cannabis offered a
means for front-line BIPOC, queer and trans and women actors to accrue material benefit and
generate other forms of incommensurable value in the face of death-dealing loss and exclusion.
In tightly-connected dispensaries, cultivation and manufacturing sites, different actors produced
a fugitive nexus of care and science that deepened cannabis’ medical applications, patient-
worker relations and bio-social properties. Such practices were fundamentally molded by radical
queer and trans, disability rights, abolitionist and labor movements that redefined the industry to
confront the devaluation of life. The expansion and legalization of the market, though, attracted
real estate, entertainment, tech and venture capitalists that advanced rapid commodification, and
forced tense contestations in LA’s BIPOC communities regarding the prospects for equity.
Tracing cannabis’ changes helps re-orient understandings of market transformation to the
grassroots workplaces where value is generated and contested. It points to the ways urban
movements concerned with more generative livelihoods must grapple with complex positions of
fugitivity, refusal and repair towards building deeper visions of abolition and reparations.
1
Chapter 1: Making Cannabis Essential (An Introduction)

It was Spring of 2020; California was trembling under the threat of the COVID-19 virus,
and Governor Gavin Newsom had made a historically unprecedented executive order,
mundanely named N-33-20, on the need for residents of the state to heed directives to “stay
home.” The order included a list that the State Public Health officer has deemed necessary to
“protect health and well-being of all workers.” Buried in the subparagraphs, under “workers in
other medical facilities”: cannabis retail businesses, otherwise known as dispensaries
1
. The order
was echoed quickly in other states with legal cannabis operations, from Colorado to Minnesota,
reversing any hasty decisions to close these and instead guaranteeing cannabis labor as
“essential” work.
Amidst the urgent crisis, Mariana was back on the dispensary floor, and with a title she
never thought: human resource manager. Some months ago, she had all but given up on the
regulated industry to strike out on her own, but delays in the city’s licensing program and uptick
in business in local shops brought her back to her former employer. The size of the workforce at
the shop had nearly quadrupled, and much of the oversight had been handed now to a range of
new senior management. From Tuesday to Saturday she would spend from mid-day until the
early morning training, supporting, and helping process paperwork for dispensary staff – a
relatively new reality for the legalizing business. On Sundays and whenever she could that
Spring she would be out on the streets with signs reading “Defund Police,” and calling for the
slashing of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) budgets under the banner of a Black Lives

1
I refer to cannabis medical and retail outlets as “dispensaries” as this comes directly from the medical marijuana
movement in California. The term is meant to set apart cannabis dispensaries from retail in its medical significance.
The name also was important because it did not signify sales were occurring, as much as a payment or “donation”
for the plant to keep these collective alive, part of California’s medical marijuana regulatory solution to continued
federal criminalization. I also interchangeably use “shop,” as my interviewees do.
2
Matter movement, part of unprecedented uprisings nationally following the police murders of
George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky. It was far from Mariana’s first
time at the protest rodeo: with the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770, she helped
corral plenty of fellow cannabis workers to public actions ranging from the redirecting of
cannabis taxes to mostly-Black and Latinx low-income communities, to Pride parade contingents
celebrating the links among queer, labor and abolition movements.
I could not have guessed where she would land the last time she and I talked, at the end of
2019, it was sometime past 11pm, on the east end of Sunset boulevard. In LA near midnight can
feel like dusk because the headlights rushing by and the storefront lights, but you knew it was
night because the temperature had dropped to whatever Angelenos find cold. Late night was our
usual time to hang because the work of cannabis is never done early, as many front-line cannabis
workers will tell you; our discussions in the last hours of the day have always been inspiring,
because she never seems tired.
That December day, she seemed weary. She had been waiting for a cannabis retail license as
part of the emergent social equity program by the City of Los Angeles. The intention of the
program was to provide relief for communities “disproportionately harmed by the war on drugs”:
people who lived in neighborhoods where arrests for cannabis were high compared to other
neighborhoods, and/or who might have been convicted of a cannabis-related crime. She had
grown up over LA, but definitely felt the impact of the war; she had been arrested working in the
industry during its tumultuous semi-licit years, but the charges were dropped thanks to labor
union support (more on that later). The social equity licensing roll-out was sputtering, in part due
to community conflict over the geographical boundaries of the program and how licenses would
be determined, but more critically due to a lack of funding for the supports the program was
3
designed to include, like a low-interest loan program or land access. Unable to make money in
the interim, she was contemplated rolling out her cannabis operation underground while she
awaited for licensing to advance.
“We have really good product, and we want to get it to people, patients,” she explained. “I
can’t wait anymore.” Some months and a pandemic later, she ultimately decided against
unlicensed operation, seeing another expansion of cannabis-work in the making and being
offered a chance at improved wages in a shop that she had helped build from scratch. Human
resources was far from her dream, but committed to the industry, she even went to seek
certification at a local private liberal arts college. She also found herself on the floor when
needed, or supporting a growing cultivation enterprise tied to the shop. $25 an hour for this labor
was far less than one could make elsewhere for this work, and representing changing trends in
compensation post-legalization. But for Mariana, it allowed her to stay in the industry in a setting
she had built. “I said no to a lot of other opportunities; I know what I’ve learned and what I
bring, and if I go anywhere else it has to be worth it, for myself, for what this means to me.”
Mariana both brought multiple forms of value and sought alignment with her values.
Mariana and I go back over a decade. We met, in other crisis, in the throes of the economic
recession (often called the Great Recession) in 2009. My friendly neighborhood budtender, she
worked in what was deemed a quasi-legal-shop not far from where were hanging on Sunset.
Budtender, to note, is a term that workers in the industry have used throughout the expansion of
medical marijuana starting in the early 2000s. While some see the term as derisive, choosing
instead to be called patient consultants or other titles, many have embraced it; as one of
Mariana’s coworkers I interviewed said, “I like the emphasis on taking care of the bud; this plant
is our baby.” When we met, Mariana and I hit it off, she had an enthusiasm and charisma, and I
4
learned every time we talked. On one of my later visits in 2012, she would hand me a petition:
help us save the industry, she told me. I was excited to see activism popping up in the
dispensary space. I asked her how I could help. One could say that is when my participant
observation began.
At the time, the fight to claim any sort of essential, much less medical, status felt more
uphill. While no officially public health crisis was on the books, one very much present if you
looked at low-income neighborhoods facing growing health disparities (Chen et al. 2014; Nobari
et al. 2018; Shin 2020). Despite their grassroots medical role, the city was trying to dramatically
curb and eventually ban the growing number of dispensaries. News media loved to cite the
statistic that there more dispensaries than Starbucks coffee shops, with hints of disdain or oa
dismissive “that’s so LA.” LA’s Neighborhood Councils, the City Attorney and several
councilmembers (including two police-affiliated ones) labeled the shops blowing up across the
city as magnets of crime, disorder, and risks to children. The only way to legally utilize the
dispensaries was to have a doctor’s recommendation, since the drug could not be prescribed. Ads
posted in the back of independent newspapers like the LA Weekly to get a $25 “medical
marijuana recommendation” (or a “rec”) for “Doctor 4:20,” did not necessarily add legitimacy to
cannabis as a health project, but gave opponents more fuel to portray medicalization as a mere
screen for getting stoned.
Yet a glimpse into the waiting room at Mariana’s shop in 2009 could tell you that the lines
between patients and “recreational” consumers may have been complex, but medical users were
not shrinking in need. At the time, many of the people I would sit with in the waiting room
struggled with HIV/AIDS, cancer, depression, and other painful and even terminal illnesses;
5
others would be caretakers for such people; others were just looking for a personal upswing in an
economic downturn.
At the time, I was self-medicating, utilizing cannabis to get to sleep and beat out the
constant waking-life of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but I did not really see it that way. I just
had always been around cannabis since I was 12 years old. That’s a story for another time and
place, but the point here is that Mariana has been at this work for a while. She stuck it out in the
semi-legal sector even when it seemed to close in on her due to police raids and bans. She had
been active in the fight that helped ensure that cannabis was reinterpreted as medicine in the city
council chambers and regulatory bodies and challenged punitive policing that had come to define
Los Angeles’ way of doing urban governance.
On one particularly rough day in 2014 after hearing of a few more raids, and visiting work-
sites with me, Mariana turned to me, “Fuck anyone who tells me that what we are doing doesn’t
matter. Tell that to the guy with cancer, the person with AIDS who comes to my shop for his free
medicine, to the dude who can’t leave his house he’s so beat down, but he comes out to get weed
and to talk.” In that moment, it was clear what essential meant – and it pushed against the
boundaries a narrow reading of cannabis as either medicinal or recreational, socialized or
commodified, but instead, pointed to a far more relational exchange.
A decade later, legalization had gone far beyond carve outs for medical use to what was
called recreational or “adult-use”

(according to Proposition 64, passed in 2016
2
). There were still
more dispensaries than Starbucks, quite a few of whom were unlicensed. Los Angeles had
become one of the largest hubs of indoor cultivation (and its associated innovations) globally,

2
California’s Proposition 64 was entitled “The Control, Regulate and Tax Adult Use of Marijuana Act,” among
many reasons for the explicit purposes of avoiding associations to children through the use of the word recreational
(though at times these are used interchangeably). Other states like Colorado’s Amendment 64 (2012) have labeled
this legalization for “personal use.”
6
and was supplying not only its own market, but both licit and illicit markets in the US. Neither
Mariana’s prospects of furthering her ambitions in the industry had not gotten any easier, nor had
her commitment to cannabis as broader medical and political project waivered.
These two moments of radical transformation – the 2008 global recession and the 2020
COVID-19 crisis and further expansion of Black Lives uprisings bookend this story and this
project. This dissertation charts what happened to cannabis economy in Los Angeles between
these two moments. I ask: what factors shaped the uneven expansion of the cannabis industry in
Los Angeles, even as the city faced protracted economic and social crisis and restructuring? How
did the shifting legal status of cannabis affect the direction and expansions of the market, and
with it, mutli-scalar racial, gendered and political structures entangled with the industry? Key
directions in the market included the central role of medical practices and expansive labor
movements in defining employment – as well as the economy’s status as a fugitive project. And,
for the practical-policy crowd, why did Mariana not have her own business yet, and why were
there still hundreds of dispensaries, cultivation facilities and others operating in the semi-
underground in LA, several years into legalization and with continued economic expansion?
Cannabis Economic Evolution, and Market “Stuck”-Ness
While most studies of cannabis start (rightfully, and we will get there) with the war on drugs
and legality, this dissertation starts with the premise that we had to understand cannabis as a
critical opportunity to understand a market in the making – legal or otherwise. That market is
fundamentally rooted in and proven particularly expansive in Los Angeles. A long tradition in
economic geography has tried to explain why some economies thrive in a particular location –
for example, why Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley. This diverse scholarship has gone deep
on spatially-concentrated or “agglomerated” relations among firms, suppliers, skilled labor and
7
other variables that lead to an industry’s growth in a given (usually urban) region (Among many,
cf. Malmberg and Maskell 1997, 2002; Storper and Christopherson 1987; Storper and Walker
1983). Scholars have identified what they call place-specific “traded interedependencies” such as
research & development capacities, “scale-intensive” firms, and the availability of high-quality
machinery that allow both end-product and capital suppliers to thrive in a city or region. To
simplify, researchers pointed to networks that coalesce to minimize the costs and provide access
to the pieces that help a supply chain thrive and allow back-end businesses sell enough product
to grow their own enterprises. Lessened distance, practically, helps lessen the costs of every
transaction. In the case of cannabis, Los Angeles became home to producers of both hydroponic
systems and new machinery used for plant extraction that spread locally and led to a proliferation
in cannabis-derivative products. Local supply chains, as the literature might predict, flourished.
Scholars have also addressed the less-visible or more intangible aspects, such as the
“conventions, informal rules, habits” that strengthen relationships in an industry (Storper 1995;
Storper and Scott 2009). Physical proximity aids the circulation of “tacit knowledge” and social
or interactive learning among firms, which also positively affects innovation and industrial
density. (And this persists, even with the expansion of digital technologies.) Again, this holds
true in cannabis: Actors drew from local networks of usually unpublished and work-place
knowledge regarding scientific cultivation and extraction processes that produce “untraded” (or
non-sold) inter-dependencies” (Newlands 2003; Storper 1995).Workers like Maribel learned
from each other how to treat illnesses with cannabis and disseminate this information via in-
person exchanges. Shops often hired former patients. Trust became vital to exchange, especially
in a context of heavy policing of cannabis.
8
Looking at these “untraded” or more tacit realities raises the ways, as economic
geographers have studied, many factors that lead to market development do not just pop up in the
present or remain static. Some of these factors have been layered over time, and others are more
volatile or dynamic than others. In the case of cannabis, the medical shift coalesced almost 30
years ago, creating a marked turning point during the HIV/AIDS crisis when LGBTQ
communities began forming dispensaries in the late 1990s. The supply chain expanded from
Northern California’s vast Emerald Triangle growing region (Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino
County) to include a more geographically concentrated web of indoor cultivators in Los Angeles.
Paying attention to these varying shifts over time can help determine not just that there is growth,
but better hone in on what kind of growth happens and why – for example, why cannabis
economies became to center on medical practices and healing.
3

Economic geographers thus have taken up the idea of “path dependence” to understand
why and how certain choices becomes locked in economic models – for example, why a whole
industry may not up and leave to another area if there are cheaper labor and input costs
(materials or suppliers) there (Clark and Wójcik 2005; Henning, Stam, and Wenting 2013;
Krugman 1994; MacKinnon 2008; Martin 2010). The concept points to the “stuck-ness” of
economies, the ways historical factors shape present choices that complicate the ability to break
old patterns and create new features. At the simplest level, history matters. In Paul Krugman’s
classic for economic geography) words, “The long shadow cast by history over location is
apparent at all scales, from the smallest to the largest” (1991).

3
This is a big deal not just for the sake of theory, but for the larger issue that celebrating capitalist growth for its
own sake can elide massive inequities and systems that cause more damage far beyond their region. (Silicon
Valley’s role in creating massive inequality in the Bay Area of California, and its damage to workers through the gig
economy is a great example of this.) An awareness of path-dependence can help in approaching growth with nuance,
to understand how deleterious and problematic directions get “stuck” in a market’s development.
9
Path dependency theorists expand ways to view how historically-specific elements of
growth and development patterns – or the evolution of an economy - gets “locked in” (Martin
2010). Processes producing historical paths includes the agglomeration process itself, a
relationship to natural resources, the hard and not-so-movable (sunk) infrastructure in a region,
entrenched relationships to other regions with related industries, or the process of “spin off”
(Martin and Sunley 2006). These can only be shaken up with a large external “shock” that upsets
arrangements and causes shifts in practices or locations. In the case of the shift to local, indoor
cultivation, for example, that shock might be tied to the rapid scaling up of policing to curtail
cross-region cannabis supply networks during the acceleration of the war on drugs.
The indoor cultivation example is key because raises a key contradiction – and a place to
re-examine the limits of more neoclassical economic geography and path dependency. Los
Angeles’ cannabis economies “agglomerated” or brought all this capital, knowledge and goods
together in what (neoclassical market-logically) would be the opposite environment for growth: a
highly policed setting that at different points either altogether outlawed or at least strongly
regulated the central commodity, cannabis.
Many of the factors described around path dependence are technological or rooted in
“firm-level” relations tied to capital. What this ignores - or at least downplays - is the politics and
ideologies that inform these supposedly neutral technologies, institutions and relationships.
Economic geographers often lump these kind of factors under institutional and market change
(Farole, Rodríguez-Pose, and Storper 2011). This model is also fairly agnostic, or does not seem
to give us much insight on who benefits from regional industries, and who does not (directly and
indirectly) – for example, who is shut out of cannabis as the legal market expands.
10
Growth of policing technologies and institutions clash directly with those of cannabis,
and yet somehow expansion and innovation occur. Schoenberger and Walker note that while
there has been movement to understand social factors (i.e. “untraded dependencies”) in relation
to growth, geographers’ assumption of economic motives often elides other “things going on
behind the visible transactions and exchanges” (2017a:2). To make sense of this, I sought to go
straight to the source: the workers and owner-operator who make up firms, and the policymakers,
governance institutions and social movements who inform the context of the industry. Unique
qualitative data, which I present in this dissertation, on the growth of the cannabis alternative
economy offers the chance to “cast new light on long-standing assumptions” underpinning
existing models of regional and local growth to understand the spatialized, mutual constitution of
market and political life (Schoenberger and Walker 2017a:23).
Through an in-depth ethnographic method, cannabis becomes a chance to address two
major components guiding path dependence: one is expanding the kinds of actors and social
forces that help shape the ways things get “stuck” in to define economic trajectories. The second
is grasping how things get un-stuck. Movements, as we will discuss, were vital to reshaping the
way cannabis was conceived as a medical industry. So too were the ways police, drug war
interest groups, policymakers and others fomented a violent war on drugs that also shaped basic
market questions like price and transaction costs and the web of production and retail
relationships. Tying both – I will argue - was a set of fugitive care and knowledge practices that
helped push against any narrow commodification, and carved cannabis as a certain refuge from
and solution to the crises of capitalism.
Legalization was supposed to do a lot of “un”-sticking and shock cannabis in a certain
direction towards a particularly ordered and controlled economy, to quell it’s alternative and
11
fugitive nature(s); that did not come easy. Many actors were not able to transition to the legal
market. Others did not want to. Stratification of the market started to take hold along racialized
and gendered lines in deepening way – from an increasingly feminized front-line labor to a
shutting out of Black and brown entrepreneurs. The knowledge and relationships that informed
the economy’s evolution frayed. An intertwined set of racial and gender inequalities just as
spatially grounded as the industry was casting a “long shadow” – to paraphrase Krugman (1991)
- over the market’s path.
Cannabis, Plantation Capitalism and the War on Drugs
No deeper and longer darkness cast its shadow than the war on drugs: a decades long set of
“institutional factors” that radically reshaped why and how cannabis became a commodity, and
who was involved. Much study of the war on drugs and the drug economy often tried to locate
and tell its story in a narrow, specific way; it’s often not even discussed as a war on drugs, it’s a
war on weed. These have influenced numerous important books that many cannabis activists
draw from in building the case for decriminalization (Among them: Campos 2012; Chapkis and
Webb 2008; Lee 2012; Warf 2014). Authors tell much about the specific histories of cannabis
prohibition, giving nuanced details of policy fights or trajectories in the portrayal of cannabis in
media and government, but offer little insight into how cannabis grew as a site of economic
production and value even as criminalization flourished and legalization stuttered.
As scholars who have shifted the public imaginary, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag
and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow offered an important first step to correcting this
story, placing the war on drugs within a broader context of the racialized political economy of
mass incarceration. Alexander’s book recognizes the ways in which criminalization has
expanded in scope to serve as a system of racial and social control, with “nonviolent” drug
12
charges being the primary driver. She lays out how lawyers, police and other actors reproduce
bias and injustice across key points in the carceral system (2010). If Alexander gave the public a
“how” criminalization operates, Gilmore gave the “why” – and she connects those answers
squarely in a specific time and place in California, of massive shifts in surplus land, labor,
government, and state capacities (2007).
It’s no accident this dissertation returns to Gilmore’s California, specifically to Los Angeles,
which Kelly Lytle Hernandez rightfully points out has been a city of inmates for centuries, in
varying ways tied to settler colonial histories, an entrenched racial order and urbanized
capitalism (2017). Their lens on place underscores one of the counter-intuitive questions about
cannabis markets: if Los Angeles is a key site where cannabis criminalization and mass
incarceration thrived, why is it also where the industry is the largest, does something intimately
link the two? How do both cannabis economies and expansive carceral systems breathe the same
(polluted) air, and grow from the same (muddy) water?
Gilmore’s reliance upon a Marxist analytics of racialized capitalism – in part the
understanding of capitalism as rooted in and structured by the production of race and related
forms of difference and power - leads us to the perfect place to consider how this market’s
expansion is inseparable from processes like policing and organized abandonment (Gilmore
2002:16; cf. Du Bois 2013; Hall 1992; James 1989; Kelley 2002; Robinson 2000, 2013; Woods
1998). Closely related to this analytics is one centering the Black Radical tradition which, per
Cedric Robinson, is as much about the “the continuing development of a collective
consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared
sense of obligation to preserve the collective being” (2000:171) As such, these perspectives gives
us grounding to grapple with the contradictory ways in which the same polluted landscape in
13
which Black (and other racialized communities) face violent social and economic control is the
same territory on which communities grow opportunities for economic survival and even dream,
as Maribel hinted, of new relationships and politics.
Black radical geographer Clyde Woods offers a way to hold both these perspectives in place
- through his analysis of the blues epistemology and plantation geographies. On one hand was a
unified regional plantation bloc rooted in the US South’s Delta – a dominant, colonial enterprise
of a ruling “ethno-class” that monopolized “resources, power, historical explanation and social
action” (1998: 29). This same geography was the formative site of a cultural, social and political
blues epistemology – that encapsulated a certain “self-sufficiency.”
Scholars such as Katherine McKittrick (2006), Deborah Thomas (2016), Lloyd Best (1968),
and Jovan Scott Lewis (2020) have expanded upon the ways plantation geographies continue to
shape contemporary market formations and interrelated political and social life, not the least of
which is the prison archipelago. In Thomas words, “modern western political economy has been
structured on the basis of a sovereign violence – grounded in the plantation” (2016:18). Indeed,
the growing cannabis economy was deeply influenced by elite regional racial power blocs tied to
development and in the carceral afterlives of Los Angeles’ own settler-colonial and enslavement
regimes, the Los Angeles kindred to Woods’ Delta plantation bloc. In Chapter 2, I highlight
some of the political regimes at work in defining cannabis criminalization, which have helped
foment Los Angeles’ enshrinement of punishment and prisons as social policy. Two key actors I
highlight as defining the region’s political-economic landscape: the power of real estate
developers (and interrelated landlords) and police, who I caution cannot be seen as merely
enforcers of a certain order.
14
The tie to the plantation geographies is not merely through the circuits of policing and
propertied power tied to racialized subjugation: Numerous interlocutors I spoke to articulated the
direct historical connections among cannabis and enslavement, to the stories of seeds brought
behind teeth and in hair by African peoples violently trafficked by white slavers to the US South
and Caribbean, influencing the later plantation hemp economy in places like Kentucky and
Jamaica and Haiti’s own cannabis economies. Researchers have also noted the links among
European colonial violence in Algeria and later, Vietnam, Hawai’i and other sites of US
imperialism and the movement of cannabis plants (Guba 2020; Warf 2014). Exploring cannabis
requires situating the fugitive economies that define it within the plantation geographies and
histories of settler-colonialism, opening an opportunity to understand how these then shape the
ways value is articulated in contemporary economic life.
Scholars clearly point to the ways mass incarceration is a means to contain mass
unemployment and unhoused life (Camp 2016; Gilmore 2007), or how it dovetails with efforts to
push our residents to make way for capital accumulation (Camp and Heatherton 2016; Smith
1996). Yet as Lorena Muñoz’s (2015, 2016) scholarship on street vending or Vanessa Massaro’s
(2015, 2019) on the intimate, neighborhood-scale economies make clear, there is also a need to
assess the ways in which those who are criminalized actually construct economic livelihoods
fitting into regional development trajectories and accumulation tied to these plantation
geographies. Cannabis gains particular significance as California’s largest cash crop, and one
employing thousands in the time period in Los Angeles I chart.
The policing of cannabis itself produces value under racial regimes of capital: Michael
Polson points out that cannabis criminalization reaps rents – i.e. excess profits above what it
actually costs to produce something – for quite a few actors, notably large landholding cannabis
15
businesses (who recycle cash flows into complex land title schemes and speculation) and police
(who quite literally extract their rents) (2013). At the same time, cannabis has had relatively high
prices due to its illicit status, which have persisted with legalization (presumably to offset higher
taxes) that also generates more money that is available in other cash crops re-shaped by global
competition. Policing ironically amplifies the plant’s monetary worth, situated in a landscape of
racialized property regimes, and as I will underscore, fundamentally interconnected to how
settler-colonial and racialized power come home in urban Los Angeles.
Black radical perspectives and geographies thus help not only consider the significance of
space and the why of Los Angeles, but also the why now of time and history. It’s no coincidence
that the expansion of cannabis economies, both regionally and California-wide, wherein the plant
secured its position as the state’s largest cash crop, dovetails with the Great Recession. Gilmore’s
analysis centers the ways recessions are not merely periodic shocks, but in fact moments of crisis
for elite restructuring of the racialized political and economic order (Gilmore 1999, 2007). The
2008 housing crash and accompanying transformations, including a wave of small-business
wipeouts in communities of color led to massive transfers of wealth. The waves of foreclosure,
unemployment, and structural economic violence particularly damaging Black and brown
communities, coupled with expanding home prices and new investment in broken windows
policing were not just a backdrop the size and continued growth in the industry, nor for the kinds
of political aspirations and intimate hopes entangled in cannabis. Medical marijuana’s supply
chain offered specific job opportunities in a low-wage service driven economy; it provided a
stand-in for socialized medicine (or at the least, affordable health care), especially as prices
bottomed out; and its illegalization ironically created enough of a premium to still maintain
profits for some. All these factors, and more discussed throughout this dissertation, made
16
cannabis an outlet for communities frustrated by new iterations of uneven development grounded
in plantation pasts and futures.
Escape from Carceral California
Yet few I spoke to would identify cannabis as a mere reflection of the market labor,
commodity, and property regimes embodying planation and carceral capitalism, nor simply as a
survival mechanism in the face of restructuring crises. In fact, cannabis was meant to be an
escape from these realities and to some extent, build life otherwise. Whether it was folks
frustrated with privatized health and Big Pharma, abolitionists or queer radicals or those simply
done with the dominant low-wage service jobs, participation in cannabis required a willingness
to counter dominant political and cultural forces and to be marked as illegal – as fugitive. Escape
and fugitivity, it’s important to caution, is not easily equated to resistance, especially in a
medical marijuana economy still entangled in capitalist property, labor and commodity relations.
Kelley offers one way to view the politics of Black (and in this case Brown, and working class)
cultural practices and movements not as simple resistance, but instead “to use Raymond
Williams's terminology, 'alternative' rather than oppositional” (1996). With this, Kelly extends
the definition of politics to the “unorganized, clandestine and evasive” everyday actions of the
(Black) working class (1996). The alternative moniker does not capture how organized and
expansive cannabis economies are in the US and globally – and the ways so many actors actively
eschewed certain policing, juridical and market power and circuits of value.
To best understand the kind of space cannabis economies represented, I turn to the concept
of fugitivity, tied to both Black radical histories and the afterlives of the plantation regimes of
racial capitalism – and with it the construction of Blackness and gender (Bey 2019; Dillon 2018;
Hartman 2019; Krug 2018). I recognize there are many larger debates about just how freely one
17
can use the concept of fugitivity, including how this might water down its historical specificity
tied to enslavement. In particular, it’s important to – as many scholars have underscored – not
simply treat fugitivity as metaphor; it is critical to decipher the ways fugitive practices among
Black communities, with their historical specificities, have shaped historical transformations,
Black radical formations, and global relations of racialized subjugation and refusal. Scholars in
Black geographies have given powerful new weight to understanding these relations as spatial
praxis, both of particular maroon communities that serve as a spatial manifestation of fugitive
life and also how fugitivity fits into new ways to consider “Black radical planning and action”
(Sojoyner 2017:517; cf. Bledsoe 2017; Harney and Moten 2013; Wright 2020). Closely related
are examinations of indigenous refusals - to be governed or to consent to coloniality - by
Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson and others, who points to the unsettling ways “for producing
and maintaining alternative structures of thought, politics and traditions away from and in critical
relationship to states” (2017:19; Sojoyner 2017).
Cannabis has distinct histories and practices entangled with fugitivity and certainly a refusal
to be governed, not just in the aforementioned ways the plant has links to enslavement and the
histories of fugitive survival, and in the last century, state agents have marked it as a form of
active rebellion against racial (and gendered) capitalist and settler orders (Marez 2004; Torgoff
2017). In the present, it has both criminalized and attracted many people who were rebelling
against economic practices and forms of state power. Across the development of the medical
marijuana field in the 1990s forward, what united many who came to cannabis was shared
position or experience as “refugees, fugitive, renegades and castaways” of the global economy,
in the words of radical planners Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013). While legal in some
sense through the 1996 Compassionate Use Act, in many ways cannabis was still outside of the
18
bounds of the legal system – both in federal law and in the “limited immunity” that the LA City
Council settled on in 2013 to identify a small number of dispensaries (leaving more than 1800
shops out, alongside banning the entire rest of the supply chain). It is not hard to see the evasion
and escape as cannabis shops were raided, re-opened, and learned to move quickly across a
restructuring Los Angeles landscape. But more than being marked illegal by external forces, or
being forced to continually be on the move, many I spoke to came to cannabis out of a refusal to
settle for aspects of Los Angeles’ mainstream (and globally interconnected) economy, a desire
for something else - often much more unfixed, hard to measure, and perhaps, fleeting.
Contemporary cannabis dispensary and cultivation arrangements I detail in this dissertation
signal the ways fugitivity was not simply a historical relation but an ever-present set of practices
– echoing the intimate scale of rebellion and evasion described by Black feminist and abolitionist
scholars (Bey 2019; Hartman 2019). They echo Sadiya Hartman’s histories of queer Black
women’s experiments in freedom; these “beautiful, wayward experiments entailed an ‘open
rebellion’ against the world” (2019:210). Such experimentation was borne, in other words, with
clear awareness and never “[forgetting] for a moment that the law was designed to keep them in
place, but they refused to live in its clauses and parentheses” (Ibid.) The intimacies they forged
in tenement houses, cabarets, theaters, with Black and non-Black women and men, through
dance, sex work, art, socialist organizing, were ways of imagining and living something freer in
the everyday. What Hartman points us to is the ways in which fugitivity is more than just
provisioning for oneself in the shadow of the plantation or racial capitalist power; it is also about
re-thinking institutional forms of care, medicine, culture, sexuality and intimacy.
Fugitive labor and commodity relations in cannabis reflect different ways of thinking of care
for other humans and of plants, documented in Chapter 3 and 4. The ideals and practices guiding
19
this were shaped in numerous ways by political interventions, by movements. Fugitive care
meant offering a refuge to others – first, mostly-queer HIV/AIDS and other terminally ill patients
and later the unhoused, underserved and those marked undeserving by mainstream social
institutions. This care was relational, non-hierarchical, and often layered with empathy. Labor
union activism helped center this care and underscore its value as a professional endeavor.
Fugitive care practices were undergirded by a kind of fugitive science, to repurpose Britt
Rusert’s term for the “wide array of…[Black] professional and nonprofessional scientists,
enthusiastic amateurs, eccentric experimenters and wayward dabblers in many fields” who
critiqued or circumvented mainstream 19
th
Century (racial) science (Rusert 2017:6). Dozens of
workers and operators I spoke with – a vast portion Black, Latinx and API and/or queer and tarns
- ascribe to cannabis a way to counter the domination of privatized pharmaceuticals, as well as
certain aesthetic experiences that push the boundaries of creativity and enjoyment. Cannabis was
consumed in ways blurring the lines among health and pleasure, and with it, experiencing space,
time and sociality differently. These scientific practices were banned for research by mainstream
institutions, and unlike a citizen science, were not necessarily meant to inform a social movement
or to make demands on the state (Averret 2017; Ottinger 2010). They existed in the shadow of
regulation and state governance, and linked queer activism, radical new Left legacies, and Black
diasporic movements. For many, fugitive life-affirming care and science offered, often, a direct
contradistinction to the violence of the war on drugs, of the deadly disparities under a regime of
“Big Pharma” (or corporate-controlled medicine), and related systems of racial capitalist power.
Fugitivity, like the circulations and relations of money, labor and labor that define markets,
has its own rhythms and spatiality. The transforming cannabis market highlights the kinds of
mobility and movement that many economic actors in communities of color must get used to in
20
order to survive. Shop operators and workers became used to the “whack a mole” – in city
official’s words – of raids on shops and continually having to keep one step ahead of the police,
of shady landlords, of rivals, of robbers (expanded more fully upon in Chapter 5). Cultivators
moved with bags of weed from shop to shop, offering their latest creations. Some budtenders
were ready to ditch exploitative employers, with ample opportunity in other shops. They fought
back at times, and others accepted the possibilities of flight. Even so, cannabis speaks to the
desires of many to find a certain fixed refuge – even to establish what might be termed maroon
communities or to cultivate what Black geographers have called “the plot” in the shadow of the
plantation (Davis et al. 2019) . For many young precarious workers, cannabis jobs meant a pause
from the endless cycle of high-turnover, low-wage retail and later, “gig” work. It meant a place
to learn a vast craft of planting, a set of care practices, and other meaningful trades unavailable to
them in a radically uneven labor market. The plant itself offers its own rhythms, slowing time
itself for many, offering a pause from the anxious insecurity of neoliberal capitalism.
Cannabis offered a critical nexus of fugitive meaning and material benefit for its participants
beyond just material gain, inextricably linked to finding life (and sometimes, liberation) across a
terrain of power tied to race, gender and other forms of difference. A nexus of social movements
converging in Los Angeles influenced their development in layered ways. These circuits of
practice and knowledge – I argue – were fundamental to the production of value in cannabis,
leading to its rapid explosion in Los Angeles.
Sparking New Circuits of Value
Cannabis’ fugitive economy was far from fixed, though. As it became a refuge for more and
more, and intersected with differing movements, deeper questions and contradictions arose. The
very hopes to free cannabis from endless cycles of police raids and criminalization through
21
legalization or decriminalization in fact heightened the tensions that had begun to emerge with
the slow-burn of medical marijuana’s passage statewide. The more city and state officials gave
their half-sanction to cannabis, the more that global capitalist investors or real estate operatives
set their eyes on the expanding market’s profits, and the more the industry began to splinter into
different experiences of fugitivity and gradients of refusal. Long-term workers and operators
differed dramatically on their political and social positions on integration from into a mainstream
market, as did different movements involved. Some actors sought to straddle the lines of legality;
others wanted to redefine the terms of integration to center reparation; and still others saw the
potential to protect their own positions as workers or operators easier with the shift.
To truly understand how the market grew, and contradictions expanded, one has to
understand these tensions as fundamentally linked to the nature of how economies produce value
themselves. What splintered both the fugitive and growing institutional practices that defined
cannabis economies were differences in who and how value should be extracted and in fact,
created through cannabis economies.
Marxist scholars have built a complex field on the theory of value, which over-simplifying it
completely, the way in which human labor, nature and culture are taken, produced as a
commodity, and given a price or societal value (for ex: Graeber 2001; Harvey 2017; Kallis and
Swyngedouw 2018; Marx 1867; Sherman 1970). At the core of is the ways in which money
comes to quantify and categorize nature, objects and human labor – how life becomes abstracted
into profit. At the end of the day, no matter how neoliberalism has convinced many that the real
source of a “brand” or global corporations’ value is the genius of upper management, the real
nexus of value is often much closer to where objects are made, services are delivered, or nature
is generated. The money - or value – from this converted life-force is then distributed to wages,
22
shareholders, taxes, interest and much more – often benefitting labor least and serving the
accumulation of capital among certain classes. In cannabis, as I’ll discuss, even with legalization
one quickly saw that branding strategies stuttered to produce magic, and multi-billion-dollar
operations had little value without tangible access to product and to budtenders.
Racial capitalist scholars tell us the valuation of commodities, and that of land and labor
itself, are fundamentally shaped by racial, gendered and other ideologies and histories, and in
fact produce such categories and the political possibilities therein. In this perspective,
enslavement of African peoples and the valuation system “institution and a legitimating
discourse that made certain human lives were dispensable vis-à-vis differential categories of
value,” tied to monarchial blood and skin color – with domination as the starting point for
modern capitalist accumulation (James 1989; Mignolo 2015). Hartman (1997), Hortense Spillers
(1994), and C. Riley Snorton (2017) have noted the ways in which genocidal processes of
fungibility – or the reduction of all difference to make “goods and products on the market that
are substitutable for one another” - undergirds contemporary racial capitalism, reducing Black
lives and labor into commodities and capital (Winnubst 2020:102).
The expansion of cannabis as a market is thus tied to changing valuation of land, labor,
commodities and capital produced by racial capitalism, and in many ways produces race and
difference as it becomes re-interpreted in the world of money, measurement and exchange. For
example, as explained in Chapter 3, a growing number of shop owners paid front-line dispensary
labor less and treated then with less respect than cultivators, in part because this work was done
by often-BIPOC women expected to serve in particular ways. Property values for commercial
spaces are shaped in part by neighborhood location, tied to histories of redlining, as well as
contemporary practices of policing and zoning; property itself is a racialized relation that
23
determines where and how cannabis takes root (described in Chapter 5). Cannabis as a plant-
commodity was at once radically ostracized and policed through cultural discourses associating it
with Blackness, migration, and the other, and on the other hand, was seen as valuable to some
precisely due to its cultural associations with Black or indigenous diasporas. In this dissertation,
Black radical scholarship with feminist labor and critical urban political economy complement
each other to show how histories of domination and accumulation are layered upon each other in
cannabis and crystallized in how the market made value – fueling a critical moment of growth.
Yet cannabis also forces reckoning with the complexity of value beyond the direct
translation into money or wealth – to the kinds of less-tangible factors that brought different
actors to cannabis and helped them stay in to build a common (fugitive) project, even at
significant risk. What other value can be made in an economy? Anthropologist David Graeber
also provides a critical lens onto value, working through decades of anthropological attempts to
understand value in varying contexts, many outside of Western capitalism, and in this
underscores many key points far beyond the scope of this dissertation (2001). Most relevant here
is how Graeber highlights the ways in which value is produced in action, in circulation, and his
call to consider pleasure and creativity beyond an act of individual consumption but as collective
and relational acts tied to value. His concept leads to a deeper understanding of how fugitive acts
of pleasure, medicine, production and more can also generate new ways to identify, measure and
create value.
The geographer Tsunesabaro Makaguchi’s (writing in the 1920s and 30s) attempts to ground
numerous theoretical attempts to consider value beyond material or economy quantity. He notes
value as three intersecting arenas: beauty, or the esthetic value that enhance life; gain, or the
material values that sustain life; and good, the properties that improve collective or community
24
life (Brannen 1964; Goulah and Gebert 2009). To Makaguchi, value was not something extracted
or simply identified; it was a generative, creative process grounded in actual experience and
interaction. Value creation – rooted in relationship to place – was crucial to both meaning and
survival in human life, and more than the abstract violence of turning material life into money.
I turn to Graeber and Makaguchi less for their categories of value and more of a
provocation, inspired by my engagements throughout this dissertation, to consider the multi-
dimensional nature of value as living, dynamic process wherein both material, capitalist forms of
gain are entangled alongside other ways of generating individual and collective benefit. In fact,
cannabis suggests these forms of value can be co-constituted and at times challenge elements of
life under the violence of racial capitalism. Woods’ less-discussed blues epistemology is also
critical here, noting the “intellectual tradition that embeds local geographical knowledge,
philosophical insights, social interrogations, and self-definition in dynamic socio-linguistic
traditions” that emerges amidst the plantation geography (Woods 2007:49). Where Woods’
blues epistemology is taken up, it’s usually in much more of a literary criticism or cultural
studies (Speight Vaughn 2020) . But Woods’ work – like much of a distinct intellectual and
material Black radical tradition, which relocates the antecedents of opposition to racial
capitalism to Africa - is particularly crucial in that it does not separate this cultural force from
political and economic reality. The blues epistemology emerges as a way to make sense of the
violence of the plantation, an alternative “consciousness, social investigation, community
development, and democratic governance” (Woods 2007:49; Eaves 2017). As such the blues
epistemology comes to offer not only sources of beauty and collective good but other ways to
make material life, generating forms of shared value and creative life under the aegis of the
25
plantation. [To note here, blues and jazz traditions were often enmeshed in cannabis culture in
both the South and North in the 1920s and 1930s (Torgoff 2017).]
Cannabis’ fugitive practice and relations, like the blues, offered different explanations of the
world from the grassroots, offering new knowledge that decentered certain established powerful
institutions like pharmaceuticals or offered new interconnections among marginalized
communities through care. Much value was incommensurable – including material relations that
tangibly shifted how people individually felt or how they interacted with others and their
environment. What is worth considering is how much the plant itself actually influenced these
ways to both explain or understand the world and to make value, in its many different ways of
altering perception (or opening it up, depending on who you ask)
So yes - cannabis offered a critical means to accrue money in exchange for labor or
commodity, but it also offered wider forms of value for workers, owner-operators and
consumers. Cannabis became entangled with social reproduction – an invisible but critical part of
the ways capitalism generates value. In plain speak, cannabis labor and medicine served
marginalized workers and communities to care for themselves and their households and even to
show up to work. They provided healing from trauma, and offered joint experiences of relief and
even creative joy. As Marxist feminist Silvia Federici notes, capitalist production is “structurally
dependent on the free appropriation of immense quantities of labor and resources that must
appear as externalities” (2012:140) While many economists and policymakers alike reduce social
reproduction to background noise to some real economy, care practices and forms of labor are
vital to sustaining and even expanding economic development, as demonstrated in the expansion
of commodified care under globalized capitalism (Boris and Parreñas 2010; Sassen 2001). There
is much more to say here, and a wide range of feminist political economy to explore, all of which
26
help us see how cannabis became essential in part for its growing role in social reproduction in a
region with a decimated social welfare system and few recourses for a burnt-out working class.
Many canna-caregivers were, women, and queer and trans actors frustrated by an ever-more
unequal, intangible and globally-bound Los Angeles economy and carceral state power. They
were willing to trade their labor (and much off-the-clock-time) not just for a chance for a better
wage but also for a not-so-quantifiable sense of self-determination and collectivity. Cultivators,
too, found a role in re-imagining not just health but a relationship to nature and plant life,
documented in Chapter 4. This became a means for both diversifying the economy, and creating
monetary and non-monetary value. My research points to the ways cannabis’ fugitive circuits of
value melded care labor, shifting cultivation practices, new scientific knowledge as well as
material gain and were the vital fuel for its economic expansion. These often circumvented, at
times countered, and even interweaved with a plantation economy that devalued Black and
brown life and labor. These fugitive circuits of value, I argue, were in part produced by
intersecting movements redefining Los Angeles, such as queer HIV/AIDS organizing and later
social movement unions, that helped accelerate and coalesce these mechanisms into vibrant but
complex political projects linked to confronting multiple kinds of deadly devaluation of life.
Contradictions also emerged precisely because fugitive circuits of value – both material and
immaterial, social and productive – seemed to drive economic expansion in the broader
(plantation) economy. Cannabis economies re-cycled and accumulated value through surplus
land, filling emptied out homes in post-foreclosure California, shuttered Sun Belt warehouses
and factories, and other sites tossed out by the uneven dynamics of regional development.
Fugitive status put a premium on cannabis prices in part due to it is risk, not to mention offered
relative freedom from taxes or other regulatory costs. It wasn’t just fugitive actors gaining: so too
27
police who relied upon seizure, commercial landlords who extracted value through extortion-
level rents, even local officials who issued tax certificates to cannabis business technically illicit
by the city’s rules. (There were only 135 limited immunity shops as of 2014 – yet LA City’s
Department of Treasury issued more than 400 tax certificates to dispensaries, claiming there was
no way to communicated between departments.)
Value and the New Green Rush
Slowly-developing legalization – and Los Angeles’ economic restructuring – eventually
brought many more seeking to siphon the value being produced, described in more detail in
Chapter 6. One major group were entrepreneurial local actors affected by economic restructuring
hitting BIPOC communities hardest – a group quite used to moving from venture to venture
seeking some modicum of wealth. Cannabis, in the words of a small-scale immigrant Iranian
business owners I spoke to, “a last chance” for those who were seeing global competition wipe
out small retail (e.g., hardware), manufacturing (e.g., furniture and food processing) or
agricultural businesses, not to mention other upper/middle class entrepreneurs. Many Black and
Latinx young and middle-aged entrepreneurs cited legalizing cannabis as a first chance often
denied at “creating intergenerational wealth.” These various actors’ hopes and frustrations
recognized their exclusion from dominant circuits of value in late capitalist Los Angeles – where
money is truly made, in real estate and finance, and where it’s also grabbed along the way, via
policing mechanisms. (Some had even tried their hand at real estate.) Many Black and brown
entrepreneurs – while not necessarily involved prior to legalization in the industry – became
advocates for social equity and saw in the industry as a means to counter gentrification and the
state’s abandonment of Black and brown communities in the style of South LA’s Nipsey Hussle.
28
Cannabis market growth also made it even more attractive to an often white, upper class 21
st

century venture capitalist investor seeking quick and high profits through speculation. In 2019,
single dispensaries were being valued for upwards of 2, 3 and 5 million, while many e-commerce
or internet startups at the time were valued in the 1 to 2 million range. Investors became giddy
with talk of cannabis “unicorns” – startup companies that are valued at $1 billion early in their
launch or development – with the rise of companies like Medmen, or in Canada, the publicly-
traded Canopy. Prices of cannabis also began to rise in stores – supposedly to cover high
taxation (meant to supplant struggling local budgets, in part paying for policing), and the costs of
producing regulated product. This required attracting new, wealthier global and local consumers,
at the expense of less-wealthy ones (even as free medicine programs started to be banned.)
Literally, one could see capitalisms’ racist death-dealing in action: a willingness to capture
monetary value and profit at the expense of livelihoods and life-sustaining medicine.
From a bird’s eye view, market expansion and legalization set off further processes of
commodification, that as economic sociologists might put it, attempting to render these forms of
plant life and relationships measurable, or rather, fungible (Steiner 2009; Zelizer 2010).
Marketing agencies, biotech firms and new entrants began splintering cannabis more completely
into its molecules, its plant properties, and more, to be traded off and sold in multiple new kinds
of CBD and other products. Finance-driven companies attempted to scrub the racialized and
gendered past from cannabis- to redefine the commodity in newly-racialized (whitewashed)
imaginaries. Large corporations like Medmen quite literally sought to define a “New Normal” -
the title of a much-maligned film and billboard campaign by the large cannabis retailer – that
could make cannabis palatable to specific market segments, including what one marketing
29
executive described to me as “Cabernet Moms” (white upper-class wealthy mothers from
Beverly Hills) in their boardrooms.
The state also found new ways to extract value – which drove more ire and frustration from
those comfortable with a fugitive praxis. The economy’s assimilation into an urban planning and
regulation model of strict zoning, taxes and fines put participants even more squarely facing a
system of policy and planning that, as Moten and Harney share, “renewed dispersal and
deputisation of state violence, aimed into the fugitive, ambling neighborhoods of the
undercommons” (2013:75). Even more frustrating for many were the ways tax resources diverted
straight into police budgets, thanks to the control exercised municipally by punitive institutions.
In sum, fugitive practice may have helped generate a wide range of circuits of value that
went beyond the narrow taxonomies and calculations of racial capitalist health, creativity and
experience, entangled with re-imaginings of queer and BIPOC life. Such circuits weaved in and
out of the “mainstream” capitalist economy, inseparable from Los Angeles’s historical and
contemporary plantation and settler-colonial landscape. Chapter 2 foregrounds this context and
how the criminalization of the cannabis economy is inseparable from historical, multi-scalar
plantation and settler logics – as well as how a particular convergence of fugitive and movement
politics in Los Angeles helped define key ways businesses and workers in the industry viewed
themselves and the plant.
This brings us to the 2010s, and across Chapters 3, 4 and 5, I chart how the expansion of
cannabis through the key bedrocks by which capitalist markets generate value – labor,
commodity, and land. Honing in on each of these areas, I expand upon how fugitive circuits of
value were integral to cannabis’ expansion as a market and guided its path (dependency) as a
particular alternative medical and health industry. Across these, I continue to highlight how these
30
chains of value did not just coalesce organically, but were a product of differing movements
rooted in place, including LGBTQ, labor and abolition movements.
In so doing, I also chart a changing Los Angeles, one in which progressive movements were
redefining the city – but were abutting against deeper challenges of generating value within
established structures. In Chapter 5 I hone in on the (plantation-)political power of police and
real estate developers, which perpetuated a regulatory process wrought with contradiction, and
allowed these two blocks of power to continue to extract significant value from cannabis at
direct expense of Black, Latinx, and other working class or poor participants. The chapter-by-
chapter explorations of labor, commodity and land attend to the ways legalization heightened
tensions and contradictions in the market, especially as cannabis attracted the attention of new
economic actors and as meaningful opportunities in other aspects of the economy diminished.
Repair, Reparations, and the Crossroads of Cannabis
This brings us back to Maribel, and the prospects and delays in offering her new
opportunities in the economy she helped build - or even solidifying such equity regulation. In
Chapter 6, I address how attempts to create policy solutions like social equity highlighted just
how fragile fugitive circuits were and how difficult it would be to translate them into an
institutional governance – especially given how much they were already rooted in refusal. On
one hand, many actors wanted to see an institutional project of reparations, while others doubted
the ability to get anything but momentary repair – to utilize Jovan Scott Lewis’ concept from
Caribbean geographies (2020). Lewis explains how Jamaican young men viewed criminalized
scams as “ethically an act of reparation” – one whose white victims were deserving, one upon
whom the Jamaican state depends, and ultimately, a means of “moral obligation to recuperate
debt for…colonial injuries” (Lewis 2020:30). He contrasts this to the often-debated liberal
31
project of reparations, whether it is transnational processes by which Jamaica or other Caribbean
nations demand post-colonial reparations or attempts to institutionalize enslavement reparations
in the US. I find similar tensions at work in cannabis. On one hand, many who viewed the
fugitive economy as their best means to create value in multiple forms, monetary, experientially
and otherwise, and to which ceding to state regulation and risking corporate takeover would end
this project. On the other, both former and new entrants sought to institutionalize cannabis as a
project of liberal reparations via social equity that could begin, at the most basic form, to give
those affected by the racist war on drugs and the racial capitalist economy itself, a chance at self-
determination (in multiple ways).
What emerged, described in Chapter 6, was less of a binary and more of a spectrum of
strategic positions relating on one end to immediate repair and on the other to the liberal, market-
grounded project of reparations. For some actors it was enough to temporarily dip into and cash
out from cannabis, losing the other forms of meaning and value that came with cannabis. For
others, the hope was to preserve elements of a more integrative economy that had thrived in the
fugitive days under the aegis of the state. Social movement unions sought to find ways to grapple
with these contradictions, and under a queer leadership, plotted new courses to deepen a vision
of reparations beyond market transactions. But union members were also met with challenges
between the need to formalize cannabis to protect it, and the ways in which doing so kept
attracting more profit-driven investors. Workers were was not the only ones assessing trade-offs
(economists’ favorite decision-making) and thinking about past, present and future in one fell
swoop. Such balancing acts were no easy matter given how fast events were moving, and how
high the stakes are for some whose whole livelihoods were bound up in cannabis or who put all
their resources seeking the once-in-the-lifetime opportunities in a changing field.
32
With livelihoods threatened, and with tense strategies at work, building a unified political
coalition to transform the industry was both urgent and complex. Those participating in fugitive
circuits of value, and those wholly new to cannabis, struggled to find a shared agenda. In a city
which the dispossession and displacement of Black and brown communities had accelerated into
the 2010s, it became harder find a shared relationship and understanding via cannabis, and many
questions arose about what the relationship should be to the local state and to the market.
Through these heightened tensions on who should gain value from cannabis and how, actors
were re-articulating racial formations in Los Angeles via cannabis, whether it was in the
potential for Black self-determination through entrepreneurship or the place of Armenians in Los
Angeles’ racial hierarchies. Widening rifts in the larger landscape and even within stores
widened, many grasped for a shared language of value, equity, repair, and more – when prior,
such a language could be found in the plant itself.
Mariana’s situation exemplifies the changing experiences among a unique generation of
cannabis industry participants who not only ensured a tremendous explosion in the industry and
helped push forward a massive shift in its political and legal landscape. The dense relationships
of knowledge, interpersonal support and care she helped build became a tacit “value
proposition,” and emulated what many economic geographers could only dream of when it
comes to a regional agglomeration. Yet in a changing context, she had yet to be fully recognized
for the value she produced: she was getting paid $25 an hour to run a vastly-expanding shop’s
human resource systems, with occasional overtime and cash to perform duties like trimming.
With expanding business post-2016 legalization, her shop’s owner-operators brought in a new
business analyst to support in management. The analyst operated with distrust, accusing floor
workers of theft, and even pushing for the firing of an employee outspoken on Black Lives
33
Matter. Union mediation processes helped ensure settlement to some of these tensions. Yet
Mariana – who had trained many of the store’s most successful staff – felt like she was “wasting
her damn time” as the analysts was driving out her most valued employees. Meanwhile, long-
time customers were dropping off, moving to the “legacy market,” to other dispensaries, even
while new waves of tourist-consumers were flooding Mariana’s shop.
Much as was occurring in other sites, both new entrants like MedMen and long-term owner-
operators like Mariana’s bosses were forgetting a critical lesson: where and how cannabis’
wealth had been created. In turn, workers from her shop were getting more deeply involved in
the union, in social equity organizing, in Black Lives Matter activism. Some were leaving
cannabis altogether, towards psychedelic therapy research or to social work, others headed to the
fully-fugitive market, and still others fought on to retain their vision at the shop they build.
Mariana’s loyalty to the company felt less and less reciprocated. “I feel like I’ve barely tapped
into what I can do in this industry,” she questioned, and she bided her time towards potentially
her own venture – even with all the roadblocks of real estate, land and capital.
She admits she could easily have jumped shift to new retail or even human resources in a
corporate space. Something kept Mariana in cannabis, something that could not be equated into a
salary alone. That “something” drives the questions and inquiries in the chapters that follow, and
in fact proved integral to the more “measurable” cash flows in cannabis. It offers the possibility
that economies can be so much more than a machine for extracting value but that – with a mix of
movements, of radical actors, of fugitive visions and blues rhythms – grassroots economic
practices and activism might help shift the paths of industries and open possibilities for creating
value. Such a potential, like Mariana saw, was ever tenuous, fleeting and fugitive, yet ever
present, even in the shadows of a carceral state and in the face of all-consuming capitalism.
34
Chapter 2: Movements and the Making of Fugitive Plants

“I against I against I against I
And I say I don't like it,
And I know I don't want it
I against I against I against I

I said who's gonna tell the youth about the drugs
About the drugs, mugs, bugs, and the police thugs
About the rotten stinkin' rackets and the fantasies
Around the nation, around the nations
Oh baby what you gonna do
I tell you the truth is looking straight at you.” – Bad Brains

“I was thrown into a rollercoaster,” Selena told a captivated crowd seated ten rows deep
among the sneaker prints and hoodies in the Northridge skate and clothing shop. Cannabis
consumers, local officials, emerging entrepreneurs, artists were gathered for “Cannabis 101,” put
in January 2018 as the official “adult-use” or recreational legal market launched in California,
even as the both state and local rules were still a work-in-progress.
Selena’s turmoil of emotions was rooted in the disconnect among her own long-term
activism for cannabis legalization and in the HIV/AIDS movement and the fact that, even as
legalization expanded from medical to adult-use, “the ways institutions in power view us,” she
said soberly, “had not changed.” L.A.’s recreational shops were slow to get licensed; Attorney
General Jeff Session had declared a new war on cannabis, and the Los Angeles Sherriff and
Police Department were running relentless public messages talking about pot use as a public
safety threat. She noted California Highway Patrol’s just-unveiled “driving while high” video
full of stoner stereotypes and the racism still shaping how cannabis was talked about and policed.
Like several of the speakers she brought to the stage, Selena situated her own story within
the backdrop of a continued war on drugs and rapidly changing cannabis market. Engaging with
this cannabis community, Selena began to treat her own rampant Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
35
(PTSD) from abuse and anxiety with more certainty, including learning about the newer
generations of cannabis with more of the element, “the first generation of low dose cannabis
therapy.” She described: “I didn’t expect that this would expand into being asked to run a
medical marijuana collective. I didn't expect to meet mothers with sick kids who needed
answers. I didn’t expect to see the creation of Charlotte’s Web. I met so many parents so
adamant, some who had lost their children, about the need for further change.”
Few would argue about the unexpected directions that cannabis took – especially if one
considers the perspectives of those like Selena, immersed in an expansive fugitive set of
networks redefining cannabis in the 1990s as part of LGBTQ+ and disability rights-related
movements. Several in the crowd I talked to had been part of these networks, managing
dispensaries or working in them across Los Angeles; a handful more were here for the “green
rush,” excited at the buzz building about the industry.
At the same time, the persistence of stigmatized images and criminalizing rhetoric enforced
by police agencies across California – which Selena noted bore a deadly price for Black,
indigenous, Latinx and some API communities – fits the long historical arc through which
different policing and corporate institutions both benefited from and defined the terms of the
debate regarding cannabis. Both were inseparable: on one hand, the “prison corridor” of
Gilmore’s carceral California described by Wilson, stretching through the Central Valley and
siphoning young Black and brown human life and capital from hubs (cf. 2007). Selena bore these
scars and despised their persistence; they were deeply etched into a landscape in ways not easily
resolved by legalization policy alone.
On the other, the flows of cannabis from the expansive cultivation operations in the
Northern California “Green Triangle” in Humboldt, Trinity and Shasta counties, through some of
36
the same prison-highways towards Los Angeles. Yet here were queer and BIPOC social and
economic networks meant to create and sustain life via cannabis, bringing together a panoply of
actors in need of medicine, care, and at times, just relief.
Animating both carceral and cannabis California were a range of movements and political
shifts – from neoliberal broken-windows ideologues and anti-drug medical lobbyists to radical
left, queer and labor activism – that ultimately sought to define the plant, its consumers, and its
role in an ever-changing social order. Los Angeles proved a particularly rife nexus for such
contestations, not just because it became a focal point for experimenting with militarized
policing and broken-windows everyday harassment, but also for the ways both queer activism
and later, social movement labor played a critical role in defining the city’s direction.
This chapter offers a grounding in place, space, and cannabis – and of the ways Los Angeles
became a fertile ground for a tense, complex process of cannabis market development that made
this economy a fertile source of value for numerous actors. This deeper, racialized and gendered
political and institutional context, though widely ignored by some strains of economic
geography, is more than regulatory background. It also informed who was involved in cannabis,
why they were involved, and how they worked together. It critically informs the kinds of
technical arrangements and relationships, the trust and solidarity, and other key factors
contributing to growth and pushing growth in a particular direction – in this case, towards the
medicalized industry and the associations of cannabis with multiple forms of healing and social
connection. Cannabis helps bring movements into a conversation on the environments shaping
regional agglomeration and reinforces the inseparability (and indeterminacy) of political and
economic institutions and processes (cf. Schoenberger and Walker 2017b).
37
Los Angeles and even California is of course not an isolated island (it just feels like
paradise?). As geographers from the more classical economic scholars to the Black Radical to
the LA School geographers will tell you, capturing market transformation means keen awareness
of different scales of geographic relations. So too with cannabis: those who sought to criminalize
cannabis and the various intersecting movements on issues like medical cannabis access and
abolition have had to operate and assert power at varying scales. Cannabis’ entanglement in
processes from transnational settler colonialism to urban punitive governance to the governance
of disabled underscores the complexity of defining a singular politics regarding the plant. At the
same time, such an analysis underscores the overlapping ways cannabis was produced as more
than just an illegal economy but as a fugitive one, an active way of interpreting and seeking to
influence multiple levels of human experience under the violence of racial capitalism.
Across this process of a shifting market landscape, cannabis is produced as illegal, and even
as state action attempts to quite literally eradicate it from the landscape, re-emerges as a fugitive
set of market and social practices. I foreground such multi-scalar processes of criminalization
and how they converge in Los Angeles in the first section –a reality that converges across
different scales, including the intimate and the bodily scale targeted for sanctioned violence
lamented by Selena.
I then move from criminalization to the ways in which a fugitive ethos emerges in the
shadow of such racialized violence and dispossession. In part, cannabis expands thanks to
different left and radical political movements, who had a wide range of claims towards the state,
some of which included a desire to be left alone (rather than to be recognized or integrated into
mainstream markets). Borrowing from the perspectives of the Los Angeles School of urban
theory, in particular Edward Soja and the analysis of Martha Matsuoka, Chris Benner and
38
Manuel Pastor, this LA story is one told in part in and through progressive social movements,
each of which come to help define the city’s politics in the mid-2000s and to define cannabis
industries (Gottlieb et al. 2006; Pastor, Benner, and Matsuoka 2009; Soja 1989, 2010). In
cannabis, from the 1960s forward, movements experimented with the blurred lines between
running marijuana as a business and seeing these enterprises as both political interventions and
as potential sources of revenue for other activism. From 1970s headshops to 1990s Cannabis
Buyer Clubs, the industry in California has been unique place where markets and movements
blur, in ways that influenced the plant’s role throughout the US.
By the early 2010s, as Los Angeles began to see a resurgent new progressive political
power, especially via organized labor; key actors involved brought cannabis into policy and
political debates in new ways, that both centered the care involved and racialized and gendered
criminalization. This may come as no surprise to given the ways US and Latin American
mestiza, indigenous and Black-women led labor movements – including movements like Justice
for Janitors in Los Angeles -have historically expanded the terms of collectively bargain to the
ways in which social life and governance is organized (Boris and Nadasen 2008; Castro 2001;
Cranford 2007; Jepson 2005; Orleck 2005; Segura and Facio 2008). The ways queer and women-
led labor took up cannabis opened up ways to address the ways criminalization converged in and
across Los Angeles’s canna-landscape and the ability to generate new momentum to pass
legalization statewide - to protect the plant and its value to patients, to workers and diverse
fugitive entrepreneurs.
With a solid historical and geographical ground, and an eye towards feminist praxis, I then
turn to why in-depth, multi-modal ethnography offers precisely the right method to understand
how these kinds of political and economic shifts play out in daily practice and influence the
39
multiple forms and approaches to value in this economy. This methodological choice is
influenced by a feminist geography and political economy that precisely allows for the
“imbrication of…social and economic processes,” one in constant conversation with Black
radical geographies and critical race studies (Werner et al. 2017:2). Attending to what Gibson-
Graham term “weak theory” that “powerfully attends to nuance, diversity, and overdetermined
interaction,” I am able to look more closely at the everyday moments of possibility in the
evasions and escapes, refusals and reclamations, and with a multi-scalar geographic material and
spatial eye, map those connections and how they grew an industry.
Plantation Politics and the Criminalizing of Cannabis
Historical and cultural studies scholars have documented the long arc of the war on drugs
across the 20
th
and 21
st
Century and its link to shifting racial formation and to a lesser extent,
capitalist transformation. Much of this history centers on the US Southwest as critical to
cannabis criminalization. Following the 1914 federal green-light to state and local authorities to
initiate their won drug policy (part of the Harrison Act), El Paso was the first to pass a local
ordinance outlawing marijuana that year, with other regions and states following suit over the
next 20 years (Warf 2014). In the 1920s and 1930s California, New Mexico and other
Southwestern states, referring to Mexican nationals as simultaneously “bolsehviks” and “dope-
fiends” (Marez 2004:108). In borderland areas, the highest rates of marijuana arrests were in
areas with the most active labor organizing and workplace tensions
4
(Marez 2004). this time
period, federal agencies and national media conglomerates like Hearst newspapers also focused

4
These efforts consolidated in the heat of Depression-era politics, at the same time as Mexican migrants were being
deported in vast numbers across the Southwest in order to eliminate workers competing with whites for scarce jobs
(Massey 2013). Drug charges based on local and state ordinances were key to deportation: migrants and Mexican-
Americans arrested on marijuana possession charges in cities like Los Angeles were given the choice of “jail on
drug or other charges, or repatriation by force or choice” (Helmer 1975; Mann 1993).
40
on producing racialized imaginaries that linked Mexican, Chinese and southern Black migration
to cannabis, opium and heroin use and to host of violent, often sexually-charged crimes (Lee
2012; Marez 2004).
Paying attention to the connections among the war on drugs and the colonization of the
Southwest (and later, to 1970s border militarization) highlights the transnational scale of punitive
drug regimes in the US– and their ties to settler colonial, plantation geographies. Recent research
demonstrates that 1930s US anti-drug ideologies were informed by two strains of thought – on
one end, ideologies in Mexico using a war on cannabis as a means to repress revolutionary
ideology (Campos 2012). On the other, from French shifts to move from medicalizing to
criminalizing in cannabis, in associating it with anti-colonial insurgencies in Algeria and with
violence threating the social order (Guba 2020). Both cases decenter the US as a sole progenitor
of anti-cannabis ideology and help consider cannabis markets, movements and actors from a
more global lens in relation to imperialism and class power in place.
Informed by both transnational shifts and proliferation of racialized fear-mongering
nationally and regionally,
5
a zealous Harry Ansligner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics pushed
through the federal 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, which used Treasury powers to create a massive
financial tax for medical and industrial
6
uses, while criminalizing other uses and commercial
transactions (Lee 2012). The Depression drug war can also be seen as yet another junction
exemplifying what Jordan Camp discusses as the longer dialectic of US mass incarceration and
the war on drugs as a strategy to contain social unrest – at the time massive labor upheaval

5
For example, In 1936, Federal Bureau of Narcotics head Harry Anslinger revealed a report that half of violent
crimes in areas where “Mexicans, Greeks, Filipinos, Spaniards, Latin Americans and Negroes” lived were due to
cannabis (Lee 2012:45).
6
Aside from cotton growers, other business leaders also played a key role in the Act: among others, the Dupont
family sought to stem small hemp production and to allow for synthetic fibers like nylon to dominate clothes and
paper production (Lee 2012; Warf 2014).
41
(Camp 2016; Marez 2004). The hearings and public discourse during the Depression mirrored a
shift that occurred in France’s colonial Algeria, wherein the national white settler medical
establishment also reversed its assent of cannabis to align with racialized criminalization (Guba
2020; Marez 2004). In this US, groups like the American Medical Association actively pushed
illegalization and called in hearings for officially referring to cannabis as marijuana, to cement
the reference as “Mexican weed.” In cities like New Orleans living under Jim Crow, local
researchers tied to the Louisiana State Medical Society produced reports claiming not only that
one-fourth of crimes in the city were tied to “hashish” (with its Orientalist implications), but the
plant was part of what had caused the mental and physical downfall of “races…once at the height
of culture civilization” (Torgoff 2017:23). Key industries like cotton, bearing the effects of
changing global competition, were more than happy to eliminate internal domestic competition
through hemp products and lobbied against cannabis.
Anti-cannabis ideologies flourished in the 1950s as part of anti-Communist hysteria and,
soon after, to target civil rights and the New Left. There were brief glimmers of change as
numerous Congressional inquiries, including the 1971 Shafer commission report that suggested
that anti-cannabis punitive policy had no basis in public health. But following the urban
uprisings of the late 1960s and with his own anti-New Left crusade, then-President Richard
Nixon ignored these trends to directly target movements and to repress racialized populations
through cannabis law, especially by steepening penalties for personal use (Frydl 2013). While
Nixon’s intent was often treated as a case of conjecture, in 2016, Harper’s magazine published a
previously-unreleased interview (1994) with former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, who was also
architect of the Watergate scandal (Baum 2016). In the interview, Erlichman noted:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies:
the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying…We knew we couldn't make
42
it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies
with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt
those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and
vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs?
Of course we did" (Baum 2016).
Nixon also used drugs to begin militarizing the border in several highly-publicized efforts
like Operation Intercept (Hernandez 2010). Cross-border policing took on an unprecedented
material scale when Nixon introduced what has been widely considered his most significant
legacy in the war on drugs – the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) – in 1973. Over four years,
Nixon and other anti-drug hawks had managed to increase the budget for federal enforcement
from $3 million to 244 million; the budget for treatment had also grown substantially to $350
million (Frydl 2013: 364).
7

Over the next several decades, the DEA became the new footsoldiers of what Nixon himself
referred to as the “war on drugs” -- with a continued emphasis on waging such battles on the
borders, and soon deep into Mexican territory. The DEA were instrumental in Mexico’s
Operation Condor, where the Mexican military sprayed U.S.-provided heavy-duty acid on poppy
fields and the toxic herbicide paraquat onto cannabis fields throughout Northern Mexico (Lee
2012). New of such a violent colonial operation eventually made its way to areas like California,
where users began to wonder how and if their plants had been poisoned. Policing operations
helped raise cannabis prices and dramatically increase an agricultural boom in Humboldt,
Mendocino, and Trinity Counties in Northern California, driven by the rise of “countercultural

7
In 1969, the year he took office, U.S. President Richard Nixon sent officials to Mexico City to request that the
Mexican government spray poison on marijuana and opium fields. Though Mexican officials initially refused to
follow Nixon’s directives, citing the deadly effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and Nixon responded with the first
massive closures of the Southwest border zones in the U.S. and a massive checkpoint system, Operation Intercept in
1969 (and a Mexican counter-response, checking every car headed to Tijuana), the two countries came to an
agreement. Operation Intercept turned quickly into the joint Operation Cooperation, where the U.S. offered some $1
million in technical assistance for drug crop eradication to Mexico as well as agreed to certain limits on enforcement
behavior (Frydl 2013).
43
migrants” who included disenfranchised (and fugitive) leftists, embodied a certain desired
marginality, and grew cannabis for “political and spiritual” reasons (Anders 1990; Corva 2014).
8

Following Nixon’s lead, in the 1980s, then-President Ronald Reagan began targeting
producers with a strongly punitive and violent racialized approach. Claiming the drug issue was
a national security one, Reagan succeeded in working with Congress to amend the 1878 Posse
Comitatus Act to allow U.S. soldiers to “enforce civilian law” particularly to engage in drug
trade-related surveillance, raids and enforcement operations (Lee 2012). In 1982, Reagan called
for what he called a “national crusade” against drugs like cannabis (Lee 2012). For both Nixon
and Reagan, the punitive approach proved ample cover for not only ignoring but exacerbating
the structural crises in the US (and global) economy, embodied in stagflation and later
deindustrialization, hitting urban communities of color hardest. Prison population swelled, and
cannabis economies were forced underground in new ways.
The war on drugs was not solely a Republican endeavor, and it was waged far more
through the domestic federal, state and local judicial and police system than through the military
in the 1980s and 1990s. Democrats in fact helped institutionalize federal mandatory minimums
for drug use and sales, sponsoring and helping pass the “Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986” in
Congress. The Act included a now-famous racialized disparity, where crack (more prevalent in
low-income, African-American communities) carried a minimum of 5 years for 5 grams – while
cocaine users (likely white and wealthier) were charged with 5 years minimum for 500 grams
(Mascharka 2000). Such an approach signaled that the public health model around consumption
was losing ground to the overall logic of punitive state power and social disinvestment.

8
Their migration might be read through a settler-colonial lens as well. Geographer Dominic Corva describes how
these planters “settled southern Humboldt and northern Mendocino watersheds such as Whale Gulch in the late 60s
and early 70s. Unlike their campesino counterparts, their marginal positionalities were intentionally chosen rather
than traditionally inscribed” (2014:3).
44
Republican President George Bush and Democrat President Bill Clinton, with new overzealous
“drug czars” appointed to the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), resurrected the
1930s tactics of pursuing “casual drug users” through new legal means. Clinton ushered new
restrictions such as removing low-income renters with any drug sentences from public housing
(tied in part to more punitive welfare approaches), while jail sentences related to marijuana
jumped 800% compared to the total Reagan and (first) Bush eras (Lee 2012). As a whole,
between 1982 and 1999, the number of people imprisoned for drug related crimes jumped 975%
-- the vast majority of which were young Black and Latino men (Gilmore 2007).
State and municipal policy and practice were not only mirroring, but amplifying the
federal-level logics of the growing carceral approach to cannabis. Gilmore’s analysis of state-
scale carceral politics is a clear cut entry point to understanding what made California a
particularly tense site of prison growth, tied closely to the war on drugs and rooted in multi-scale
global, federal and state economic surplus capacities (2007). As historian Donna Murch
documents, militarization of the LAPD (and LA Sherriff’s Department) accelerated in the
1980’s, especially aimed at Los Angeles’ predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods at key
junctures such as the 1984 Olympics (2015). She explains, “The Reagan era’s intensified wars on
crime, drugs, and gangs, the martial imperative grew stronger and received large increases in
funding (especially through expanding asset forfeiture) and direct support from municipal, state,
and federal governments” (Murch 2015:166). A multi-scalar political economy of policing
amplified in cities in ways that facilitated urban development and contributed to wholesale
dispossession of targeted populations.
Informing continued canna-criminalization at the urban scale – and expanding alongside
medical cannabis in the early 2000s - was an ideology of “broken windows,” one vigorously
45
embraced by Los Angeles’ police and legal regime under former NYPD Chief William Bratton.
This referred a policy imagined by Kelling and urban policy scholar, James Q Wilson in a now-
famous (okay, among probably activists and scholars) Atlantic Monthly article that became
widely adopted in policing practice (1982). The main gist: any sort of marker of disorder, such as
an empty lot or graffiti, were magnets of crime and disorder that would spin off into larger urban
chaos. While Kelling and Wilson admit their theory was based on “folk wisdom” and not any
actual evidence, the solution was then to prosecute minor crimes aggressively, to prevent an area
from becoming “vulnerable to criminal invasion” (1982; Ritchie 2016). Minor crimes, informed
by rapidly-expanding war on drugs, very often meant marijuana possession.
“Broken windows,” entangled with a war on drugs, had become the basis of New York
Mayor Guilliani’s regime of redevelopment in the 1990s, with then-New York Police
Department Chief Bratton executing a “rapid restructuring” of the force that included the “stop
and frisk” regime and intensive patrols enforcing “quality of life” targeting unhoused
9

populations and young Black and Latinx people (Kaplan-Lyman 2012; Smith 1998). Gilmore
and Christina Heatherton (2012) and George Lipsitz (2016) demonstrate how when Bratton came
to LA in 2002, his “Safer Cities Initiative” brought a similar regime of control and punishment
criminalizing Los Angeles’ Skid Row poor residents to make way for gentrification of
downtown. As several interviewees pointed out, “broken windows” policies criminalizing public
use of cannabis even for medical purposes automatically place the unhoused and public housing
residents in the pipeline for arrest and harassment.

9
The choice to utilize un-housed signifies the fact that these residents have been actively displaced and removed by
state and capitalist institutions from the possibilities of finding stable homes and shelter (Welsh and Abdel-Samad
2018)
46
Important for the ways medical cannabis plays out, the drug war also operated and was
contested at the most intimate scale – the household and ultimately the body. Anti-drug groups
led by self-identified parents were key figures in numerous waves of pushing for further
criminalization, including in the late 1970s in alliance with doctors who pushed for a research
agenda to show cannabis’ harms (Heddleston 2012). Citing theorist Lauren Berlant, Tom
Heddleston notes that the framing of the drug war increasingly portrayed cannabis as an assault
on the intimate public sphere of white heteronormative nuclear families (Berlant 1997;
Heddleston 2012). The subjects under threat? Fetuses, infants and children – who conservatives
also claimed were at risk from queers. It’s not surprising that this space should be a grounds for a
(drug) war, given that the Cold War was a key terrain for what Jenna Loyd calls “militarized
domesticities” or the “the material and symbolic use of the home and home front as the places
that national security states claim to work to protect” (2011).Middle and upper class white
suburban parents became a key vocal block to this end, alongside an expanding private medical
industry and emerging university and non-profit infrastructure producing anti-cannabis
knowledge and media.
Even some advocacy groups in communities of color found themselves awkward
participants in a growing anti-drug industry. Murch suggests that in part, organizations that
would have normally challenged police’s militant incursion in Black and Latinx communities
reluctantly turned to prohibitions as a key way to deal with the most harmful effects of state
disinvestment (2015). Liberal and faith-based organizations took up their own efforts in anti-
drug education as a strategy meant to protect communities from what they saw as an external
harm spatialized as other. In many ways, drugs were read in the same lens as the liquor stores
targeted in the post-1992 uprising: imposed by “outside” (often immigrant) actors on Black and
47
brown neighborhoods, with the value (i.e., profits) moving out and the (assumed) harms staying
in. As such, a growing generation of Los Angeles Black and brown-led community organizations
influential on issues of racial inequality in the 1990s were widely absent from - or even
prohibitionist - in their stances on cannabis.
In Los Angeles, municipal politics often reflect this tension between attempting to capture
resources and prevent harm – as I’ll discuss throughout this paper. Champions for labor and civil
rights like multiple term LA City Council, Board of Supervisors and California State Assembly
and Senate member Mark Ridley-Thomas, for example, has been a blunt advocate for marijuana
prohibition throughout of his multiple decades in office. During the post-legalization efforts to
shape County policy, Ridley-Thomas was unsparing in pushing for an outright ban on cannabis
in the county; as County official I spoke to explained, Ridley-Thomas saw cannabis no different
form crack (in ways reminiscent of 1980s gateway drug” propaganda), and was sure this was the
best way to protect his constituents.
Read together, several key trends tie together the uneven and complex history of cannabis
criminalization as they converge in Los Angeles: a central role of cannabis legal regimes in both
extending settler colonial violence and enforcing a plantation order; the acceleration of this war
in key moments of structural economic crisis; the attempts to repeatedly erase of medical use as a
valid project through intimate-scale fear politics that involved private medical industries. Most
consistently, cannabis criminalization was inseparable from shifting modes of governance,
especially the cyclical turns to punitive violence and social disinvestments centered in urban
landscapes. At a practical level, this means that the war on drugs was never a closed singular
phenomenon but one layered in numerous levels of racial capitalist transformation – embedded
in other words on plantation geographies. Numerous elite actors converged on making the war
48
on drugs a vehicle for redistributing state and market resources to the detriment of Black and
brown communities and fitting closely with efforts to divest from and discipline these
communities. Even so, an entire apparatus of state and market actors – including police forces
and anti-cannabis medical practitioners – were relying upon and extracting value from cannabis’
persistence, through both raids and producing an industry regarding its imagined danger.
Producing Fugitive Ideologies
Criminalization, though, does not automatically produce not fugitivity. It can create a class
of people marked illegal. It can lead to erasures and destruction, and it can even allow for state
and market actors, as noted, to extract wealth from the very thing they claim to fight. How then
did this same landscape inspire cannabis to expand? To understand the production of fugitivity in
relation to racial capitalist power, and to grasp the expansion of cannabis as an economy,
requires a turn to the political movements that converged to protect the plant.
Even before the development of active cannabis legalization movements, cannabis
consumption in the US – especially in the 1920s forward – was enmeshed in different cultural
spaces that challenged the cultural norms of the plantation economy. In fact, in cities like New
Orleans and in New York, in the Harlem jazz scene, cannabis was not too far off from what
Woods describes in terms of the blues epistemology (Torgoff 2017; Woods 2007). In other
words, while not exclusively centered on a politics of cannabis, the plant creative expression and
making sense of and making life in Black geographies from the Jim Crow South to hubs of the
Great Migration. It also came to inform other political movements like the rising Beat culture.
It’s not until the 1960s that the US starts to see an explicit activism on cannabis
decriminalization – attracting a complicated mix of New Left factions, consumer rights
advocates, student groups, and some libertarians. The first major group to gain public attention in
49
the 1960s, LeMar, was founded by a “civil libertarian” attorney, but then found itself linked to a
range of anti-war and other new Left activism, mostly on college campuses (Heddleston 2012).
A LeMar leader in Detroit, John Sinclair, was arrested after years of surveillance, and then used
his defense campaign to promote support for the Black Panthers through founding the White
Panther Party (WPP). Sinclair’s case became a lightning rod for supporters who highlighted how
his long sentence for offering a joint to an undercover officer was in fact a “tool of political
repression,” leading to his eventual bond by Michigan Supreme Court (Ibid.). His WPP then ran
a slate of candidates to Ann Abor’s council that would both call for decriminalization and
stopping anti-LGBTQ laws. While Sinclair’s case was in Detroit, LeMar and similar
organizations’ base tended to be on the West Coast, primarily in major public university cities.
While LeMar was hammered by state repression, especially given its direct ties to Black
Power movements, the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML),
founded by attorney Keith Stroup in 1970, lasted much longer and made more headway on
cannabis policy. Stroup had worked on the growing consumer rights movement, and was a
protégé of Ralph Nader’s (Dufton 2017). He also understood the importance of cementing a
broader coalition of young leftists, building a strong alliance with former attorney general
Ramsey Clarke, a strong anti-war voice (Heddleston 2012). Clarke’s role is critical here in
establishing an early emphasis in NORML on the problems of punitive governance more
broadly, and linking New Left anti-imperialist movements. Notably, a prominent critic of
Clarke’s public writing on criminal justice reform was James Q. Wilson, who would go on to
champion broken windows ideologies.
Important for the later attempts at shifting the terms of the cannabis economy, the California
cannabis cooperative and organization Amorphia (which merged locally into NORML),
50
developed its own brand of cannabis rolling papers for joints, “Acapulco Gold,” that was sold as
a fundraising mechanism (Davis 2015). The name refers to a particular stain of cannabis grown
in the Guerrero mountains surrounding Acapulco, and had gained notoriety during the 1970s,
speaking to the transnational ties of knowledge and production linking to Mexico. Amorphia
and also relied on large network of cannabis paraphernalia or “head shops,” which were run by
so-called “hip capitalists” and “right lifestyle” entrepreneurs who saw it possible to use these
retail spaces to benefit political causes and to expand access to liberatory consciousness (Davis
2015, 2017). Debates would later emerge with the proliferation of cannabis paraphernalia or
head shops about the “allying,” in one cannabis columnist’s words in the late 1970s, of
“marijuana ethic to general consumerism…bound to intrude on the consciousness-altering ritual
of smoking weed” (Davis 2015:82).
10
The funds from Amorphia and NORML’s rolling paper
sales and from head shop benefactors purportedly were critical to bankrolling a first, failed
attempt at decriminalizing cannabis in 1972 (Davis 2017). Cannabis retail spaces, in other words,
emerged as both political spaces and nodes in an expanding transnational network of cultivation
and consumption.
A mix of direct Nixon and Reagan-era political repression, heightening drug war
propaganda, and internal contradictions meant that the decriminalization movement failed to gain
significant steam on its own terms. For many of the countercultural migrants (noted above)
fleeing to the Green Triangle to set up cultivation in the late 1960s and especially post-Operation
Intercept in the 1970s, they were doing so to remain “off the grid,” due at times to direct
experiences with police repression of left activism during the COINTELPRO era (Corva 2014).

10
Headshops found themselves targeted in similar suburban and urban controversies as dispensaries, targeted by
neighborhood groups as magnets of crime and threats to youth. While Carter passed some moderate regulation, local
organizations managed to pass anti-head shop ordinances in dozens of municipalities and nearly all states during the
1980s (Davis 2015).
51
In that sense, they were not interested in gaining recognition from the state at the time, and saw
cannabis as an opportunity to create a fully fugitive system of exchange and relationality. (The
nature of this counterculture, of course changed over time, including as migrants found an
awkward alliance with local ranch owners and loggers, and cannabis kept being reinterpreted in
different public spheres.) It was not until after many years of direct action struggle in California,
in 1996 HIV/AIDS, disability and anti-criminalization activists succeeded in passing the first
medical marijuana law in the country, Proposition 215 or the Compassionate Use Act. At the
center: a new generation of radical queer movements like ACT-UP.
11

The rise of queer cannabis activism in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis put front and stage
the connections among criminalization and premature death. Such need spurred activists to
develop the dispensary as an institution of health and to birth quite a few of the systems and
practices diversifying the commodity, outlined further in this dissertation. Selena, now in her
early 40s, was one who helped build these networks in Los Angeles, and paid a steep price,
including incarceration. Her experience she shared with me begins: “I was just going down to the
city with my friends and it was – hey, can you do a favor? Can you bring some weed, to our
friend, and oh, by the way, did you know that our friend is HIV positive, and needs this
medicine?”
Selena described the arid stretch of California’s interstate Highway 5, flanked by vast
agricultural fields and parallel to the Highway 99 “prison corridor” geographer Ruth Wilson
Gilmore elucidates between the metropoles of Los Angeles and Sacramento (2007). Since at

11
There are critiques of ACT-UP and similar more militant HIV/AIDS movements worth mentioning here. Some
charge were born of the fact wealthier gay white men saw their economic position of privilege and ability to freely
consume shifted due to the crisis (though this might be a bit of a simplification and in my experiences erases non-
white leadership in such movements that I came across in my research); scholars have also critiqued the movements’
enforcement of sexuality in binary terms (Brown, 2016; Cohen, 1997)
52
least the 1960s, these highways had carried cannabis – with Central Valley towns like Selena’s
(and Melissa’s) serving as key junctures for suppliers from Northern California growers (that at
the time dominated the market) to move their supply. The Valley’s struggling agricultural
economy, under the duress of indebted farms and global competition as Gilmore describes, also
informed residents’ readiness to take up cash-paying opportunities to exit rural poverty (Ibid.).
For Selena, it was more than the money: “I related to the friend that my friend Kevin was
sick, and his story – how his parents kicked him out of the house, abused him. For me, the
minute I heard, our friend is sick, I didn't think of anything else.” Kevin had found refuge in Los
Angeles, and soon Selena found herself delivering cannabis to him and other HIV/AIDS patients,
including to LGBTQ hubs, like West Hollywood and Silverlake. At the same time, the networks
of sociality she encountered included meeting fellow lesbian and bisexual women of color,
spending nights smoking, drinking and building relationships in Los Angeles that would have
been restrained in her home town. She credits these moments as allowing her to find new
confidence in belonging to queer and Latinx communities. Social connection, in other words,
entwined with material survival–linking urban and rural into a solidifying cannabis supply chain.
This brings us back to Selena’s first of many Cannabis 101 sessions that exciting and tense
February 2018 sessions, as Los Angeles’ legal market launched. Selena brought to the stage a
medical marijuana patient active at the height of the earliest medicinal cannabis movements.
Kirk was a close associate of the recently deceased Denis Peron, who had passed away on
January 27, 2018, just weeks after adult-use laws came into operation. A long-time collaborator
the assassinated LGBTQ+ activist and councilperson Harvey Milk, Peron organized with Milk to
pass a San Francisco local measure in 1978 calling for the effective decriminalization of
cannabis; during the HIV/AIDS crisis, Peron became the face of the medical cannabis movement
53
as he provided cannabis to his partner and other community members with AIDS (Dioun 2017).
Kirk shared in detail the experiences during those times: “You would watch your friend or
neighbor who hadn’t been to the table in six weeks, because of the nausea, the vomiting, the
retching caused by AIDS, particularly in the early days, all of a sudden be able to eat.” Cannabis
would temper the havoc wreaked on the body by the first generation of anti-retroviral drugs,
preventing emaciation and extending survival for some.
In the era of conservative presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, the US was
marked by overall national apathy and active disdain for queer life, as Scott and others “watched
our friends drop dead around us for 8 years, a nightmare for anyone that lived in or around gay
communities, an entire generation of the gay community disappeared.” While Peron and
colleagues began to experiment with cannabis as medicine as early as the mid-1980s, the first
medical marijuana initiative did not pass in San Francisco until 1991. Queer activists then
proposed and helped pass the Compassionate Use Act (Proposition 215) statewide in 1996. The
Act was vague in its language on regulation and enshrined a model of cooperatively-operated
collectives (often registered as non-profit organizations) where medical marijuana patients
participated in the cultivation and manufacturing of the plant. Patients could designate an entity
to do so on their behalf and “donate” cash for product instead to support the collective.
Many such collectives began as Cannabis Buyer Clubs (CBCs), which alongside person-to-
person delivery, became the main hubs for accessing marijuana. Dewaine, a queer Southern
transplant to Long Beach who fled a conservative home in Tennessee, would travel to West
Hollywood’s CBCs shared to me his long journey to reach these islands of medical care and
social support. “It was just this little office space, on the second floor; you couldn’t tell what was
going on, and I was shy at first about going. I didn’t feel like I belonged many places, even in
54
West Hollywood.” But Dewaine did find mutual aid, a shared sense of community and at key
moments when work was scarce, the medicine was free. Peron consciously hired staff at the
clubs who were HIV-positive or terminally ill, and while often derided as a “circus” in media,
the spaces themselves also included areas to “gather, relax and consume their medications”
(Feldman and Mandel 1998:181; Dioun 2017; Reiman 2008)
Despite the generalized critique of ACT-UP and the HIV/AIDS movement as white-led,
numerous Black and brown men, women, and transgender folks ran CBCs and other services,
and the little patient data from the 1990s show that near a majority of patients were non-white or
had incomes under $20,000 (Reiman 2008). This was particularly true and vibrant in Los
Angeles, including Paul Scott’s Black-run CBC in Inglewood and Jewel Thais Williams’ Catch
One nightclub that also served as a AIDS service hub and eventually a natural health center
(Oganesyan 2020; Romero 2013; cf. Brown 2016; P. F. Cohen 1997). Many were located in
intersecting areas of Crenshaw, Inglewood, and South Los Angeles, whose histories of queer
Black politics are often elided. In part this may be due to the ways these were spatialized in
CBCs or dance clubs like Catch One, that were at once spaces of politics and pleasure.
The CBCs provided the institutional framework for what would become dispensaries,
organized often in a more collective structure, with minimal hierarchy. While each CBC would
have a “price board,” these prices often were far below the average “street” market price at the
time (Dioun 2017). Donations were flexible; patients with no resources could get free bags of
weed; growers would come drop off and donate free bags of cannabis as well for the collective.
Some CBCs provided other medical services, including mental health support groups and
specific spaces for those grieving the loss of lovers, community members and neighbors, as well
as free food, clothes, games and music (Feldman and Mandel 1998; Reiman 2008).
55
Kirk did not identify as gay but had suffered a crippling accident. Multiracial disability
rights activism was another central axis of the medical marijuana movements in the 1990s and
2000s. In a separate interview, as clubs morphed into storefront dispensaries and expanded
across the landscape, Dr. Hope described how, as raids intensified in the early-2010s, she and
other disability and queer rights activists would hold die-ins in the Valley’s somewhat muted
political landscape to draw attention to these realities. Their work was supported by the Occupy
movement at the time, which saw the active attacks on this community medical infrastructure as
part and parcel of a negligent state and cut-throat capitalist economy. Anarchist and direct action
networks, and media sources like IndyMedia, were key channels of communication, and activists
planned coordinated responses to raids, directly confronting police.
Different cannabis-related activists’ experimentation with both direct action against
criminalization and forms of informal and formal economic survival from the 1970s forward
kept the lines blurred between the political and economic projects tied to the plant. The market’s
development was always in conversation with shifting grassroots movements – from New Left
and anti-imperialist movements in the 1970s to queer political uprisings in the 1990s – entangled
in transnational networks and shifting modalities of retail, cultivation and consumption.
Participants in these movements had numerous intersecting critiques regarding state power and
violence and regarding the death-dealing nature of capitalism. But their response was not always
a reform of the state as much as a desire to create self-determined spaces – whether it was
decriminalized cannabis exchange in the 1970s or cannabis clubs in the 1990s – that did not fit
neatly in dominant economic models. In other words, throughout this time, a diverse politics of
left and queer resistance coalesced alongside cannabis’ alternative supply chains and experiential
56
and social practices - all of which kept money and other forms of value circulating through these
fugitive networks.
The political discourses that proliferated about cannabis often took on the state at the scale
of the body and the intimate, and individual freedoms. This operated at multiple levels. Much as
cannabis was pitched to the US public as a threat to household stability and children, so too were
queer movements challenging dominant models of social reproduction– particularly the imagined
white nuclear family of Reagan-era. The emphasis on the household and individual at times took
the fight away from other scales of political change that were affecting cannabis – most notably,
the changing regimes of urban governance and regional power blocs tied to the drug.
Cannabis Goes Inside-Outside
This bring us to where our story comes together: just as economic crises were fueling
new waves of raids through the drug war and associated broken windows politics in the early
2000s, so too were new forms of participation in the market growing. Los Angeles had
experienced various forms of economic change during this time, not the least of which was the
expansion of social movement labor seeking to alter an increasingly "free market" social contract
and the city's historical "open shop," anti-union position (Davis 2007, Milkman 2006).
After the storefront collective structure was codified further into law via a 2004
California state senate bill (the oh-so-well-named SB 420), medical marijuana operations
expanded to a wider range of actors – many young Black, Latinx, Russian, Armenian and white
male owners, but a much more diverse workforce, mostly female and often queer, in the
dispensaries (and a wider range in cultivation). In terms of operators,
12
some had once

12
I use owners, operators and owner-operators interchangeably because some of these were run as collectives, and
some of them were just two to three people who could hold on to a rented space to be able to dispense cannabis for
some months before getting raided. “Ownership” was a very fluid concept in this industry up until licensing was
much more codified in 2018, and such ambiguity still exists in the informal-ish market.
57
distributed cannabis from their homes or on streetscapes, others were new to the scene
altogether, coming from everything from failing furniture stores to real estate to long-term
unemployment. Many identified with movements described above. Los Angeles’ witnessed an
explosion of shops starting in 2006 – to make it the largest retail market globally – supported by
the world’s most massive indoor cultivation system. I spend much more time in subsequent
chapters addressing why and how many came to cannabis during these crisis moments.
Yet during this time, cannabis politics witnessed new transformations. Regional splits
emerged, and many Northern California cannabis activists and green triangle growers often
talked with disdain about their Southern colleagues. Despite their common roots, when it comes
to popular media, LA’s medical shops are often described with a subtle racist criminalization that
demarcates them from the Bay Area ones. For example, a 2020 Politico article on the troubles of
multi-state operator MedMen snipes: “To this day, the northern California cannabis scene
continues to be associated with activism, while the southern California scene remains associated
with criminality” (Schreckinger and Zhang 2020). A lack of a cohesive coalition on cannabis
statewide informed a few failed attempts at legalization. In 2010, an attempted state legislative
bill by San Francisco’s Tom Ammiano (inspired and tied to the LGBTQ movement) and a fairly-
libertarian legalization ballot (Proposition 19) initiative by marijuana activist Richard Lee failed,
the latter losing to 53.5% of the voters (Caulkins et al. 2012). In part, the two bills evinced the
kinds of ideological schisms developing among those more rooted in the movement-era politics,
others seeking access to the commodity, and an even less visible group across both that did not
want to renounce the ambiguous and fugitive status of cannabis.
If anything, one of the differences among Northern and Southern California medical
marijuana shops is more the active criminalization and process by which the latter (more
58
racially-diverse in the actors involved) faced a more concerted response from local and regional
law enforcement. (Both, though, have faced extensive federal criminalization.) While
legalization slowly advanced, it did not necessarily shift the treatment of cannabis by police
forces like the LAPD – and the attendant racialized frames by which cannabis was discussed,
especially in Los Angeles. Interviewees recalled a key turning point in the targeting of cannabis
collectives when, after Los Angeles City Council passed a series of municipal regulations from
2010 on giving the LA Police Department (LAPD) carte blanche to raid dispensaries and destroy
or expropriate their property. Southern California’s local political context from the broken
windows present to its own settler colonial and plantation histories, as noted above, in part made
for far different police responses.
In Los Angeles, grassroots organizations and economic actors, though, were starting to
see these articulations between the policies of social abandonment, a broader urban policing
political-economy, and the broader devaluing of queer and BIPOC life. The growing Occupy
movement proved allies to queer and disabled patients and dispensary workers in growing stand-
offs continued between anti-cannabis councilmembers and police political forces that culminated
in a local ban in 2012. Cannabis workers found that while they had one or two champions in city
council, their mostly grassroots, fugitive movement was gaining little ground in a shifting
landscape. Due in part to a distrust of state institutions, many could not easily squeeze into the
shifting local movement landscape where progressive, base-building organizations were
redefining regional equity (cf. Gottlieb et al. 2006; Pastor et al. 2009).
Identifying to some extent with some of the values of progressive Los Angeles, and
recognizing the changing political power from below, a group of small cannabis dispensary
operators sparked a conversation with a potential ally, who was starting to make slow moves in
59
the cannabis space in other parts of the state: labor unions. They found particularly receptive ears
with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 770, who represented some
35,000-plus grocery, retail pharmacy and food production workers, among others. Local union
leadership – at the time, spearheaded by mostly-queer of color organizers – recognized the
potential within a future expansive sector. Some also empathized with both the HIV/AIDS and
racial justice elements of these movements. They set a nimble organizing apparatus into motion,
gathering nearly 90,000 signatures in a matter of weeks to repeal the ban, and then just as
quickly offering a new referendum for the ballot. After the city proposed a more modest
ordinance, a compromise Proposition D (2013) was placed on the ballot and passed. The end
agreement authorized 135 shops for limited immunity, according to strict zoning laws.
Proposition D would become the closest thing to a solid authorization of cannabis and even so,
was nothing close and no guarantee of safety from raids, nor did it address the vast chain that
actually supplied shops; it did though create the basis for who was legalized first in 2018 (see
Chapter 4 and 5).
As raids accelerated and a local ban was threatened in 2012, numerous young workers
joined the union movement and publicly shared their stories, motivated by far more than an
interest in a better paycheck and protections - though they also desired these basic rights. Front-
line workers like Rosemary shared on video: “About 6 years ago, I lost my father to cancer. I
remember him telling me at his last moments that he wanted to take something for his pain, but
he didn’t want to take any heavy medication. After that I got into nursing.” She went on to
describe how “she is still working with people” with health issues, but these are medical
marijuana patients. “The compassion that I have them, I feel like it builds a relationship as far as
60
a worker’s point of view and patient’s point of view.” Labor organized centered the relationality
among budtenders and patients, as much as the shadow of premature death.
“It’s a been long time since we brought out the lab coats,” Cesar, who headed the union
effort at the time, laughed. Workers tied to the union filled City Hall chambers with medical
marijuana dispensary workers dressed in pharmaceutical lab coats, borrowed from their retail
pharmacy counterparts in the union. They donned the robes of medical expertise, in actions
wearing white coats, a counterpoint to the coalesced complex of medical and anti-drug advocates
that had sought to erase cannabis’ medical properties. Many described the relationships with
their current patients (which I go into much further detail in the next chapters); they raised the
ghosts of those that they had lost. Medical patients joined them to share tearful stories; advocates
even pushed LGBTQ Councilperson Paul Koretz to share his own stories with HIV/AIDS and
medical marijuana, and to be a sole dissenting voice. In one of the early hearings in 2017 to
shape the new adult-use regulation for Los Angeles, one patient explained:
Compassion defines a feeling of deep sorrow, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate
that suffering. Twenty years ago, the state of California passed a revolutionary bill that
sought to alleviate the sufferings of various ailment to which cannabis has been shown to
effectively treat. Disabled patients like myself have lived in the shadows, cultivating to
provide relief for others who could not do so ourselves and often times at great risk to our
freedoms and liberties, being treated as second class and undesirable citizens because we
have a belief in a medicine that has helped us.

Narratives regarding access to the plant and a willingness of the state to accept premature
death among marginalized populations infused hundreds of testimonies given at dozens of City
Council hearings from 2013 to 2018. These narratives speak to the ways that – even two
decades after the Compassionate Care Act passed - many budtenders, cultivators and advocates
were fully articulating relationships of difference and actively produced vulnerabilities that they
were trying to name, and combat. Projects like Paul Scott’s Inglewood shop recognized these
61
intersections and evinced their own queer of color critique recognizing particular vulnerabilities
and solidarities. They evinced a queer politics that was not simply, as Cathy Cohen critically laid
out, an opposition to homonormativity but an inclusive political identity that can challenge
“static, monolithic and bounded categories” and address the inequality tied to it– and I argue, do
so in ways that rethink how life, death and nature were bound up in these categories (C. J. Cohen
1997:441). This is precisely why radical disability rights and a queer and feminist labor politics
both fit well into the medical cannabis project.
Whether or not anyone agreed with unionizing their shops, many agreed that the presence of
the UFCW Local 770 in cannabis was a “game-changer” at a moment when the industry was
threatened with total shutdown in 2013. The union’s ability to rapidly marshal political support
draws in part from its shift to a social movement strategy and ability to impact Los Angeles’
shifting regional political economy since the 1990s (Gottlieb et al. 2006; Milkman 2006; Voss
and Sherman 2000).
13
Through a more confrontational and coalitional approach, unions have
accumulated significant strength to shift urban politics in Los Angeles and even help elect pro-
labor politicians, several of whom were at the table later when LA’s full “adult-use” local
regulations were crafted (Pastor 2018).
The UFCW local brought its own “social movement” approach by organizing often-
criminalized cannabis workers and centering the leadership of queer members (of color) to
redefine the local cannabis movement. Cannabis workers came to make up a large portion of the
union’s queer sub-group, which attempts to respond to the particular needs of LGBTQ workers

13
Starting with the rise of movements like Justice for Janitors in 1991 led by Black and Latinx workers, Los
Angeles became ground zero for a renewal in U.S. unions that challenged the more acquiescent model of
cooperation with industry in private sector labor movements during the postwar era that often excluded women,
Black, and immigrant workers (Fantasia and Voss 2004; Laslett 2010). Militant labor organizers from Central
America and Mexico who came during (US-spurred) economic and political crises and had to work in low-wage
service and manufacturing transformed Los Angeles’s labor landscape, as did organizing nationally that led to more
diverse leadership at the AFL-CIO (Fantasia and Voss 2004; Laslett 2010; Milkman 2006).
62
and build cross-industry affinities. The success of the union in mobilizing these ties gives further
insight into what Ruwanpara and others describe: that the success of labor organizing under
globalized neoliberalism has often hinged upon “ways in which collective struggles are able to
draw upon local histories and multiple worker identities” (Ruwanpura, 2016: 446; cf. Ashraf and
Prentice, 2019). Yet this is not new, nor is it ubiquitous in labor: this orientation has been
historically driven by Black, mestiza and indigenous women across the Americas, informing Los
Angeles’ own trajectory at key moments such as the Justice for Janitors strike and return of
domestic worker organizing (Boris and Nadasen 2008; Cranford 2007; Freshour 2017). As
Freshour points out, contemporary US labor movements led by Black and Latinx women
particularly surface the crises in social reproduction and violence of organized abandonment
(2017). [In fact, one main leader in the cannabis organizing drive came from the Black and
Latinx-women led poultry organizing in the South that Freshour discusses (2017).] Expansive,
feminist-informed labor movements in Los Angeles– led by queer people of color in this case –
opened new avenues to assemble regional coalitions and offered, for the first time, a more
comprehensive vision of cannabis among at times fragmented and hard-to-reach actors.
But the solidifying power of labor in Los Angeles and California was not the only change
at work. Medical marijuana further expanded locally and Proposition 64 emerged statewide at a
moment when there was a moment of making and unmaking of the “common sense” that
policing could be a replacement for (or the sole ends of) social policy, opening a conjunctural
space of possibility. Indications of cracking carceral hegemony in California were visible in the
passage of Proposition 47 (2014), which reclassified a wide range of “low-level” offenses from
felonies to misdemeanors. As Manuel Pastor notes, Proposition 47 could not be easily explained
as simple matter of demographics being destiny, of Latinx, Black and some API communities
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often targeted by criminalization gaining numerical advantage (2018). It had to also be
understood as a product of shifting organizing tactics to span mass-base cultivation, direct action
and voter engagement, to increasingly-diverse coalitions of progressive social justice activism
that included unions (Ibid). Quite a few groups and individuals entangled with the fight for
decarceration and to some extent abolition, like the Drug Policy Alliance and ACLU, led
cannabis regulation efforts, including participating in Reform CA and later social equity fights.
A year prior to the passage of Proposition 64, Ferguson, Missouri was the site of a
national political awakening following the shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren
Wilson. Ferguson would the precursor for the exponential growth Black Lives Matter movement,
brought together in 2015 by organizers Patrisse Cullours, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi (Cullors
2018; Khan-Cullors and bandele 2018). The protests, and the underlying movements that had
been spurring them had, in many ways, “thrown [the Broken Windows] police-led project into
crisis, perhaps policing’s greatest crisis of legitimacy since the 1960s” (Mitchell, Attoh, and
Staeheli 2016:197).
14

Much like in the case of the shooting of young Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman,
the defense attorneys for Brown (which might as well as have been prosecuting Brown post
mortem) noted toxicology reports showing the presence of THC from cannabis in the
bloodstream of the slain Black youth (Byers 2014; Lopez 2014). Yet in the context of expansive
BLM activism, such stories rang flat for some audiences, only further fueling re-evaluations of
the drug war.
15
Virulent mainstream media coverage of the officer’s claims about cannabis

14
These protests, too, had to be read in relation to the kinds of economic inequality brought into relief by the
recession, and interrelated with Occupy; for more, see the Camp and Heatherton (2015) volume.
15
This of course, did not stop marijuana from being raised continually as justification for murder by police after
Ferguson– including the killing of Philandro Castile by Minnesota officer Jeronimo Yañez, in which the officer
linked marijuana’s second-hand smoke as a sign of reckless violence. During the case, Yañez claimed he feared for
his life because he had smelled cannabis in Castile’s car, with a child present: "I thought, I was gonna die, and I
thought if he's, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five-year-old girl and risk
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seemed to make even more clear that the drug war was a racial project, an increasingly-thin
cover for criminalization of communities of color, drawing particular focus on how this played
out in everyday city and neighborhood life.
The rise of BLM nationwide and a more progressive, labor and community movement-
influenced political landscape guided the passage of Proposition 64 in a way unlike either the
legalization of cannabis in Colorado or Washington in the years prior, or the prior activist-
proposed cannabis bills in California. In particular, Prop. 64 included the most comprehensive
provisions to (that) date regarding the retroactive decriminalization of cannabis, as well as a set
aside of state taxes for “repairing the environment, youth treatment and prevention, community
investment, and law enforcement” While these priorities could be seen as contradictory, the
focus still showed an interest in at least reckoning with the drug war’s harms.
As Erica, an activist involved in the passage of the legislation explained:
“Prop 64 did that every other marijuana legalization policy initiative has not done is take
– they took it to the next level. They didn't just legalize marijuana and create a tax and life and
structure to support it. That's what everybody else did. Right? They went, ‘No. Let's do that and
let's go give money back to the people and fix a lot of the harms that the war on drugs has
caused.’ So, the criminal justice reform, the social justice reform, pieces of that policy will
hopefully become the gold standard for the rest of the world.”

At the same time, Prop. 64’s language and topline emphasis on a “system to legalize, control
and regulate” the entire supply chain of cannabis spoke to a widening gulf between those
advocating for legalization and those resistant to what would happen to their fugitive networks
and practices. The tradeoff in legalization was moving to make cannabis a legible economy and
site of further government regulation. For labor unions, for example, this was not a problem but
an opportunity to actually secure some protections and involvement of workers. Despite the

her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing, then
what, what care does he give about me?" (Ingraham 2017)
65
enthusiasm of many like Erica, in the lead up to Prop 64, numerous left, abolitionist and cannabis
groups offered mix reviews of whether to actually vote “yes” on the measure. Some – especially
cultivators - discussed it as a trojan horse for corporations to take over cannabis and destroy the
ecosystem; others decried it as the state’s attempt to identity and clear out underground actors
with still more punitive measures. Some of the most vocal advocates I interviewed working on
social equity still proudly brandished how they voted No on 64, and others reiterated the only
reason they were voting Yes was the urgency of freeing those imprisoned and stopping arrests.
Different cannabis participants’ hesitations regarding Prop. 64 – and the continual ways the
debate resurfaced across the local regulation process and to even the time of writing –
foregrounds how the political debates on legalization were underpinned by deeper question of
who should benefit from this economy and what role it should play in society. From Back-to-
Land growers to Black, Latinx and Armenian informal sector small operators to front-line queer
care workers, many sharing the cannabis table statewide and locally held very different
perspectives on the future of the different chains of value that sustained them. Their ideas were
inextricable from different positioning across a racialized economic landscape, and how
legalization or continued fugitive status might affect this and address or even redress the
inequalities they did (or did not) experience. At the same time, the intimate scale of political
discourse – from the green closet to the freedom to smoke – helped in part to make cross-cutting
alliances possible, rescaling politics to the individual and the body as the pre-eminent scale of
political engagement, and often foregoing what kind of collective projects are at stake (or
addressing race head-on). They also made this project fragile.
To reduce these tenuous coalition politics to the influence of free market neoliberalism
would be to ignore the lineage of political ideologies that help inform it, including the anti-statist
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orientation, queer collectivities, abolitionist agendas and anti-corporate convictions. What this
does signal – and what I explore in the chapters ahead - is the fugitive material, cultural and
political nature of cannabis economies made movement-building even more complex. At stake
was the ways cannabis offered other ways of doing markets, generating health care, or making
money. The refusals baked in there and desires not to be governed made building a political
coalition far more complicated, at any scale, and left confusion among many a policymaker.
In Los Angeles, labor unions played a critical role in breaking the impasse regarding Prop.
64 and in advancing engagement in local regulation– not to mention offering a visible conduit
linking to those inside the halls of power, tied to a more progressive, labor-backed actors. But
Prop. 64 was just the beginning of the process. Each jurisdiction was given the right to set their
own regulations, including to outright ban cannabis. Los Angeles City Council, following the
lead from other progressive policy efforts pushing for equity through giving stakeholders a voice,
jumped into a massive, nearly two-year public engagement process on cannabis. Labor unions,
entrepreneurs, medical patients, and others had much work to do to understand what motivated
each other and where they might actually support each other – and these started to become
crystal-clear in the regulations process. Experiences in the fugitive economy both unified them
but also set up future conflict in this loose coalition, and how much people wanted to see the
regulatory frame shift practices within the industry. At the same time, with the continued
aftermath of the Great Recession, with the successive waves of economic restructuring, new
economic actors were entering cannabis to seek refuge and repair, or simply, to make an
imagined millions from a new fountain of value.
Seeing Markets from the Grassroots
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A broader historical political-economic, racial capitalist context of how Los Angeles’
cannabis industry became fugitive, including its development alongside movements, offers some
insight into the institutional context collectives and businesses navigated and how certain
economic paths, including a grounding in health, took hold. But there are risks with this view
from the top – not the least of which reducing medical cannabis to some kind of strategic frame
or discourse to get to legalization, versus an integral set of practices that grew in complexity (cf.
Dioun 2017). How did these political shifts actually translate in the way the market was
producing value and attracting different actors? How did this multi-layered past play out in the
present – and how has it helped define cannabis’ future?
When it comes to understanding why and how the market expanded towards and through
legalization, and how this reshaped racial and gendered politics related to cannabis, we have to
look closer to the ground. Similar to other labor and other movements, a set of actors who also
were working with each other, supplying each other, learning practices from each other and
much more were working out the economic vision for cannabis in their workplaces and
relationships. This less visible scale of politics and market-making is where I spend much of the
dissertation, interweaved with an understanding of the everyday organizing and politics that
happened before or after the city hall or county building testimonies, beyond the public protests
and actions, and usually, with a shared joint or vape pen.
Qualitative description is critical to an understanding the kinds of political understandings of
the economy and the ability to uncover moments of possibility and change. The geographic
perspective on diverse economies offers a useful methodological practice, one that draws from
feminist methodologies that are interdisciplinary and while mixed-methods, wholly
ethnographic. Gibson-Graham push for a kind of “weak theory” that powerfully attends to
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nuance, diversity, and overdetermined interaction” and also “observes, interprets, and yields to
emerging knowledge” (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006, 2014:S149). They reference the importance
of the contemporary anthropological practice of “thick description,” which helps deepen
understandings of everyday practices without jumping too soon to their significance or
emplacing them in a story already (Geertz 1973; Gibson-Graham 2014). This point of view does
not deny (in the vein of some grounded theory methods) that there is theory to be built from and
does not assume a clean slate in the world, but it gives voice to “small facts” that can help
rethink social theory and its underlying assumptions (Ibid.). Such methods also follow other
feminist geographic political methods which take seriously both everyday practices and the
meanings and discourses (re)produced by actors (Billo and Mountz 2016). Given the focus on an
alternative market formation – and some of the kinds of politics that cohere around this – this
approach is a critical way to go in-depth to see the subtle ways people transform both economic
practice and political action, especially in fugitive economic spaces.
From the (inter-related) Marxist point of view, one cannot talk about capitalist value without
actually examining labor and everyday economic life. As much as the global financialization of
capitalism since the 1970s has appeared to spin money into more money, cannabis (which was
not directly under many of these global finance mechanisms at time of writing) was an
opportunity to come back to tracking more tangible processes – from the ground up - of where
and how a single plant becomes a commodity or a person’s or community’s care turns to cash.
The Black Radical perspective provides the insight to also look closely at whose labor is valued
and how, which land becomes the grounds for growth, and how commodities are understood –
examining these as articulations of racialized and gendered power and difference that shifts over
time. Finally, given the more expansive ideas of value outlined in Chapter 1, I also wanted to
69
make sure to capture the different ways people understood the value of cannabis: to see from the
ground up what people believed they were building, why they continued against all the
challenges and policing, and why they were organizing to set their own agenda for the industry.
I think of fieldwork in two phases: a preliminary part-time fieldwork (while thinking full-
time about the realities I was seeing), helping establish me ties, and a second more intensive
phase of engagement, that took up weekdays, weekends, and whenever the work called for it.
The first period was a crucial time to build trust and also put in “sweat equity” beyond cannabis
for UFCW Local 770, including on a larger grocery campaign against the multinational chain El
Super (which actually several cannabis workers supported). The second phase corresponded
roughly with the passage of Proposition 64 (2016), and opened up new opportunities, and I
found, a more open, willingness to speak. I cannot say whether it was solely due to the changing
legal landscape or simply getting to know more people after putting in the hours - either way, I
was grateful for the many hours many interlocutors spent sharing their experiences.
Starting in mid-2014, I conducted participant observation with the United Food and
Commercial Worker Local 770 organizing cannabis retail workers. I participated in numerous
organizing visits to cannabis shops and observed meetings with owners, city council staff, and
other advocacy organizations, including on local enforcement and the writing of the initiative to
legalize recreational cannabis in California. I observed and sometimes chipped in to labor
processes and spoke to numerous workers and owners about how they organized their
workplaces and why. (Having had previous experience working in the very informal sector of the
industry helped here.) In this context, I was able to begin to recognize the interrelationships
among actors, but also to identify the ways in which labor, exchange and organizational forms
varied substantively from more institutionalized capitalist models.
70
In 2016, I began to attend the monthly public meetings put on by the City of Los Angeles
and by the state’s nascent Bureau of Cannabis Control to shape post-Prop 64 local regulations. I
was invited by the union to participate in and observe closed-door meetings with city officials to
shape the regulations, particularly regarding the social equity policy. I attended different forums
and discussions put on by community and industry groups to give input on and discuss
regulation. Eventually, I also took a more lead role in trying to at plan and put on some of these
more coalitional and intersectional spaces and tables, based on connections to other
organizations. These were in part research spaces to hear how people envisioned and wanted to
see change in the policy, but they were also very much geared to building some consensus and
mobilizing actors at key junctures in the regulations process. From 2018 and up to mid-2019,
and again in 2020-01, I had front-row seats to the process of implementation, continuing to
attend public council and policy meetings where stakeholders gave feedback, but also organizing
with workers taken through the process.
Alongside this more formal organizing and engagement, I also kept returning regularly to
several well-established, pre-legalization shops (that you’ll hear about repeatedly), both informal
and regulated, to see how things were developing and to informally talk about how workers and
owners felt about the changes. Because of the rounds of licensing, very few new formal shops
opened during this time, though towards 2018 and 2019 I did visit some newer cultivation and
manufacturing sites.
It’s important to note that over time, I selected out about a dozen or so different individuals
– a range of differently-positioned dispensary and cultivation workers (i.e., front-line and
managerial) in the formal and informal sector; after 2017, several social equity actors attempting
to transition cultivation or extraction businesses, or another, attempting to create a dispensary
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and delivery. I followed up regularly with them on where things developed through personal
calls, texts, hang-outs, and where needed, directly supporting at times in helping them attain
certain goals. For example, I supported one social equity business closely in their attempts to
obtain a license, and helped another worker as she was fired from one job to navigate to other
opportunities. I did so out of both a sense of gratitude but also recognizing my privilege and
access to different networks, and my intimate understandings of these processes. At different
points in the process, I also tried to help set up institutional assistance via the union or with
certain attorneys and consultants, or through the city, to reflect these needs – to make sure that
what I was learning was not just helping individuals who I had built more relationships over
time. (This is an ongoing process, that continues past the dissertation process.)
Throughout both phases, I wrote five-sense, thick-descriptive fieldnotes and recorded voice-
memos to myself. I supplemented with publicly-posted city and state hearing transcripts to
ensure accuracy. The ethnographic practice of thick description informed how I took fieldnotes
and considered my position as a participant observer, and the ways in which I later analyzed for
particular moments of difference and possibility
Interviewing from the “Inside”

To further understand how participants in the cannabis industry thought about the market and
why and how it was changing, I completed 75 semi-structured interviews with cannabis business
owners, front-line workers, labor and criminal justice advocates and city officials. Interviews
cover actors’ involvement in the cannabis market, including political engagement, daily worksite
practices, and where they view the industry in 2 and 5 years (and their plans therein). Each
interview was approximately 1 to 1.5 hours.
Sample interview questions include:
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5. Tell me about who works with you at the shop. About how many coworkers do you have? How
would you describe your relationship? What do you enjoy about working with them? What
conflicts or challenges do you have with them?
6. How did you learn to work with cannabis as medicine? How did you learn how to work with
the patients [or for cultivators with the plant?]…
10. What is the biggest reason you remain involved in the cannabis industry?
11. Describe to me what the industry might look like in 5 years? 10? Where do you fit in?
15. Why Los Angeles? What made this city such a huge cannabis market or industry?

Table 1: Interviewee
Breakdown
Phase I (2014-6) Phase II (2017-20)
Interviewee M F T/
GNC
M F T/
GNC
Total
Advocates & Organizers (incl.
labor and attorneys)
2 4 1 3 4 1 15
Union Workers/Members 1 3 1 4 6 2 17
Non-Union Workers 1 4 3 8 16
Cannabis Business Owners 2 3 8 6 1 20
Policymakers 4 3 7
Total 6 14 2 18 25 3 75
Self-identified gender: *M=Male, F=Female, T/GNC = Transgender or gender-nonconforming

Interviewees were recruited using the networks I built carefully starting with ethnographic
work with the cannabis worker union effort, via an informational flyer. At the end of each
interview, I asked interviewees to refer others to participate so as to “snowball.” Interviewees
were recruited with attention to racial and gender diversity and to the geographic location of their
worksite or business. It’s important to note here that there are no official demographics of the
cannabis industry; I have a sense from the extensive networks of the UFCW Local 770 (which
had some worker data in-house for shops it represented or surveyed), and from direct
conversations about this in interviews, that my sample reflected the fact that budtenders skewed
female or transgender, and non-white - often Latinx, Black, Armenian and sometimes Filipino
indigenous. Cultivation skewed more male and also non-white, and ownership most definitely
73
more white-identified (US born Anglo or Russian and Israeli included here), Armenian
16
and to a
lesser extent, Korean, Chinese, Black and Latinx. I spoke to a wide range of advocates and a few
consultants and attorneys for cannabis businesses who were not business owners or workers,
which identified as Black, Latinx, white, Asian and Native American (skewing, in my sample,
towards the first three).
In an industry with a complex legality, and fugitive status, I assumed most participants were
seeking anonymity and confidentiality. I did also understand that this would be tricky, especially
when talking about the politics of cannabis regulation. There are not too many players in the
field, and many have distinct perspectives and work (for example, there is only one major service
union involved in the US). I had to confront the contradictions with research on fugitive practice
and refusal, and the risks associated with documenting these – especially at a moment when so
many are seeking to profit from the industry at the expense of long-term actors in cannabis.
What I found was that quite a few people made a political choice to have their names
included because they wanted, in one activists’ words, to challenge the stigma. Another offered
that they had many run-ins with the law and this was the least of their concerns. This grounded
me in an understanding that while this was in many ways fugitive, some I spoke to saw the
political importance to tracing these narratives at a moment when regulation was in flux and
questions, including what reparations might look like, were up in the air. To many I spoke to,
sharing their stories was a means to highlight just how much value came from the grassroots, and
how the current market actors were in many ways indebted to those at the front lines. They – in
another’s long-time operators’ words – “did not want to be erased from cannabis.”

16
Are Armenians white? It depends on who you ask. I place them as part of a category of South West Asian (with
Arab, Iranian, and other groups) people who’ve been historically and legally viewed in the US as non-white
(Gualtieri 2009). I talk more about Armenians distinct place in local LA racial formations in Chapter 6.
74
That being said, whether they wanted their experience highlighted or not, workers most
often accepted confidentiality, in part reflecting their vulnerability to both their employers and
the law. When it came to different organizations, if their work was in the public sphere, I did not
anonymize it. In the penultimate chapter, I name a specific company, MedMen, as they were also
the only major multi-state operator at the time in LA. I had hesitated at first because they are also
a very litigious company; it turns out, as will be discussed, that they were so for a reason, and at
times of writing, they are on the verge of being sold off in parts. I do not name any MedMen
employees and fully anonymize their experiences because they are probably the most vulnerable
to retaliation, no matter who ends up holding the licenses for the corporation’s shops.
Mapping Expansion – and My Position
In first rounds of analysis, I analyzed fieldnotes and transcribed interviews to understand
what economic expansion looked like qualitatively (i.e., who was involved, how they were
involved, and why they were involved), and started to put together both a landscape of the
industry and a timeline regarding how changes occurred (one playing out in real-time) and how
these fit into racial capitalist geographies. This was important because it took me out of the
narrow sliver of expansion, I saw early on visiting certain shops in mostly central Los Angeles,
or reading the latest in the LA Weekly, and into a more complex map of growth linking the San
Fernando Valley, the South Bay, South Los Angeles, and other key hubs. This was gradually
overlaid with much of the historical primary and secondary (both academic and news) resources
and geographic, urban studies and labor scholarship referenced earlier in this chapter.
In subsequent rounds of analysis, I sifted through data to identify: (1) different informal and
formal elements of the industry that matched what economic geographers have identified as
leading to economic expansion (i.e. networks of tacit knowledge, etc.); (2) other factors
75
interlocutors identified as driving economic expansion and the production of value and
transformations in the industry’s regulation and structure (i.e. movement organizing); (3) aspects
described as the challenges or barriers to growth and participation in the industry. I developed a
list of such factors and began to analyze how the way they worked fit into understandings of
race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of difference. For example, I selected out the kinds of
“untraded” dependencies and knowledge developed in cannabis, and how those I spoke to
described the ways this was built in relationship to HIV/AIDS crisis but also in managing
traumatized populations facing high health disparities. Situating these again in the larger
landscape of Los Angeles and the industry’s changes over time, I began to more clearly lay out
how the industry was changing alongside the city, and with it, race, gender, and other formations
of difference. Eventually, I started to see how they coalesced around issues tied to land, labor
and capital and structured the broader market. This gave me a chance to then go back to the
bigger picture of racialized capitalism and better situate these changes in the broader
developments in these fields in Los Angeles (which meant, get back to reading!)
As I continued to write and analyze, I found myself continually trying to understand and
reflect on how my own position produced “situated knowledges,” embodied and particular
knowledge based on my own position (Haraway 1988). Like Mariana, more than one-half of
workers, owners and organizer/advocates interviewed identified as LGBTQ. I initially did not
make an explicit effort to recruit LGBTQ participants yet found many identified as such. I did
ask queer participants, when they shared about their sexuality, if and how they related this
positionality to their work (as I did in regard to other identifications – Black, Latinx, women, and
so forth, if they identified as such). As a brown Arab cisgendered queer male who has been told
he can “pass” as heterosexual (especially coming to interviews in baseball caps), I wondered if I
76
was shutting down potential learning. I would casually mention that I had a partner, ask for
gender pronouns, but such may have appeared standard in the context of Los Angeles activism.
Several early interlocutors, though, spoke to me about their political imperative to openly
identify as queer in cannabis spaces in recognition of the queer histories of cannabis and to
counter the inscribing of heteronormativity into the cannabis space (detailed in this article).
Sharing an affinity to this, I found as Lorena Muñoz did, the “possibilities that open up when we
employ,” as she describes, a “racialized queer consciousness” (2016a: 58). In the later years of
fieldwork, when I was conducting most interviews, I began to introduce myself as queer, and
mention in interview openings my recognition of the queer history of cannabis. I attended and
visibly posted on social media (where I interacted with cannabis community) about LGTBQ
cannabis and labor events. I noted interviewees opened up more during conversation, and spoke
directly about their experiences in relationship to sexuality. I added specific questions about
LGBTQ relations in the economy, one that elicited important responses from non-queer workers.
My experiences – shaped by the conviction of interlocutors – re-inscribed the validity of
informing methods with queer of color critique that recognizes the fluid nature of queer spaces
and actively engages with multiple positionalities and constructions of difference (Arrizón, 2006;
Ferguson, 2004; Muñoz, 2016a). Across the process, I had to understand how where I sat and
what I have experienced shaped how I was in interacting in this space, to both embrace the
partiality of my views and to also push myself towards recognizing the potential when I fully
embraced who I was in relation to this project.
To that end, I often also had to grapple with this question of fugitivity and my own
imbrication in its complexity. In many ways, I was participating actively, as noted above, in the
process of documenting at-times fugitive practices and making them visible to audiences that had
77
policing power or who may want to market from them. I was also directly feeding into certain
political processes, sharing data in reports and conversations with the intention to help hone
social equity laws. This often had to be done with a knowledge that many did not see eye-to-eye
in terms of legalizing, including doubting the process altogether. Of course, I took efforts to
conceal, obfuscate, and ensure that confidentiality was respected. But there was a deeper
question at stake, especially in my position in an institution with its own significant power in Los
Angeles (including in relation to policing and real estate, two areas I address in this dissertation.)
Part of what kept me pushing forward, though, was a provocation, and really, a mandate
from one of my first interviews. Susan, had owned a dispensary in central LA, which one of the
people she distributed to through networks linked to the Green Triangle. A proud lesbian, she
had found affinity in the cannabis histories of “fierce queer stories of weed, ACT-UP, the
HIV/AIDS crisis” and held on through the ups and downs for the ability to care for her partner,
who was suffering from a rare orphan disease. Coming from a small farm background and then
owning a restaurant in the California countryside, she built several successful dispensaries and an
entire cultivation network in her style and in ways that she felt contributed to the community. It
was never easy, but as she said, she never let any of those boys intimidate her. I later met one of
the first budtenders she hired, not realizing they had worked together; he was now a successful
lead at another shop and confirmed every story was even more true than I thought.
She, too, had her doubts about where legalization would go. But she was willing to take a
risk for the possibility communities would suffer if there was no declared end to cannabis
criminalization. At the end of our first conversation, she left me with a task:
“When you talk to all these people, the city councilors, the state folks, all these new
regulators – I want you to ask the questions that matter, ask them in a way that makes them
think. Ask them, ‘What will happen to the boys with the backpacks, these young kids who
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moved weed from place to place? What about the network of guys who ran around and
knew how to peddle weed? What place will they have in this economy?”

She feared, even then, that many were already being “pushed out from harmless weed, to the
next thing, to heroin.” She paused: “How do we bring these people back?”
Her questions helped balance my own doubts and concerns with an understanding of what
this research might support or work with in solidarity and at the least, what it might to do stem
collective and institutional erasures. Part of what follows is an attempt to take questions Susan
and other participants in the market raised and amplify them. Who were the networks of young
and older people who built this industry, who laid invisible tracks of relationships, knowledge,
and practice that generated an economic explosion? What happens to them as the eyes of the
world turned to the plants they made grow? What place do they want in what comes next – or
better yet, what do they want for the world that comes next?

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Chapter 3: Relational Labor at the Roots

There are two ways that this can go for us. We can buy into the old frameworks of,
when a disaster hits, it’s every person for themselves. Or we can affirmatively choose a
different path. And we can build a different world, even if it’s just on our building floor,
even if it’s just in our neighborhood, even if it’s just on our block.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on crisis and mutual aid. May 11, 2020.

It was about three in the morning in Spring 2017, but it could been 6pm because the lights
from empty offices, streetlights and traffic signals kept it a dusky purple in the sky. We were
sitting, four across on the cement wall, not far from downtown Los Angeles, backed by fallow
ground and chain-link on one of LA’s many mountainous residential terrains. Perched here
allowed a view of a broad stretch of Sunset Blvd. as it winds to a close into apartment
complexes, the gush of water on Echo Park Lake, old Victorians and new construction.
Since it is mid-week, and not yet summer, the streets at night were relatively empty, aside
from the bright red buses with yellow lights are still running; you could hear their hissing brakes
all the way up here. The bar we just came from down Sunset did have a decent crowd of other
workers in the service industry; after all this is Los Angeles, and there is never really a truly slow
day. The budtenders tended to get off work just before the bars closed, when the cleanup of the
shop and the inventory and seemingly-endless administrative tasks wrapped: usually, time for a
drink or two at a bar, a round of pool, and then to a house or a car or a hill to smoke.
At the time, Mariana was a floor manager at the Care Partnership (CP), one of the longer-
running storefront dispensaries in LA (a decade or so old at the time) tucked in an east
Hollywood strip mall. She flanked the group, decked in what can best be described as LA-skater-
queer-chic. You could always count on her to open up any silence. She takes us back to a
moment a few weeks ago: “Remember at The Aviary we were like buying rounds for 5 people at
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once?” She rose to her feet on her Converse, pointing at each of us: “You need a drink, you got a
drink, you need a drink?”
Sean, a customer who is a friend of theirs who works in the service industry, laughed,
“That’s why we get a long, we all are raised like that, we take care of each other.”
Mariana said, “For reals, I’m like looking, and I haven’t cashed a check in two weeks, and
I’m like, C!” – and she looked over to Caitlin – “Are we just making bank, am I not spending,
what’s going on? And she’s like, nah we just have been working like crazy! 55 to 60 hour weeks,
work hard, so then I just want to go out. I’m all pumped on energy, and everyone’s low key, I’m
talking to everyone and all high energy and shit.”
Not everyone is that energized after a week like that, Caitlin offered: “For reals. But some of
the girls, they just want to go home after work, they don’t want to see people – just hit a blunt,
fall asleep. I have some days like that.” Caitlin was the more femme of the queer pair, which
have worked in the same dispensary for at least 7 years; both got their start in cannabis at CP, in
as medical marijuana was exploding. Both of their energy – even one blunt or two in - is
infectious, buzzing even, laughter reverberating down the hill.
The “so many people” the budtenders serve comes into the foreground of the story. Mariana
shared: “This job has made me the smartest person ever, know people so well now, watch them
all day long. You get to know their body language, what they want, what they are trying to get.
I’m like, ok, dork, this is for you; ok, stoner, ok, homeboy this is for you.”
But moments after the laughter, quiet: “Still, you never know what will happen though. In
comes this woman the other day, and she’s like yeah, I took 10mg of CBD and I had to call 911,
go the emergency room – I thought I saw demons, I was screaming and freaking out. They had to
strap me down to the table.” Now it was very quiet on the hill, and we awaited to hear more.
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“And I’m just listening to this, and all of a sudden, she’s like, that was the worst night of my
life. Except when I got raped at age 9. And I’m just listening to this, and she has pointed out the
THC tabs and I’m like, you know, maybe you should put that back. Actually, yeah. - you should
put that back. I’m like no, we need to figure out what else is going on, and she starts sharing her
story.” The solution was bringing her to take a much lower dosage of medication that was more
geared to post-traumatic encounters, heavier in CBD versus THC. The kind of heavy, weighing
moments Caitlin described became clear.
How did a dispensary come to hold all of these complex relationships and with it, human
experiences? More, importantly, why and how did a group of young people -very often Latinx
like Marina and Caitlin, or Black and API, women and often queer – become tasked with
managing these profound interactions? Cannabis retail labor (and cultivation) is laden with thick
ties among numerous interrelated actors: patients or consumers, owner-operators, and managers,
many of whom share relationships to the plant and to the economic and political system that
stratifies Los Angeles. While some economic geographers often look more to the firm level for
these interdependencies that drive economic concentration and expansion, a feminist and labor-
centered approach brings us to these networks that reverberate with compassion and care as
much as with shared experiences at the conjuncture of racial capitalist crises.
Any conversation on the ways cannabis expands as a market in Los Angeles – or even its
relationship to the war on drugs and criminalization – has to include an understanding of the
kinds of interpersonal, intimate labor that drive why and how the market (socially) reproduces
itself – and produces value. Like other forms of intimate labor, cannabis’ intimate service work
is reflective of gendered and racialized divisions of labor and imaginaries that enroll women of
color in roles of care for lower wages and at the risk of non-consensual sexualization and
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violence. Some hiring and management practices reflect gendered and racialized hierarchies that
reverberate across capitalist histories of care and service labor that tasks women of color with
reproducing the nation but also strip them of autonomy (cf. Boris and Parreñas 2010; Gutierrez-
Rodriguez 2014; Nakano Glenn 1992; Parreñas, Thai, and Silvey 2016). In a context of Los
Angeles, young non-white women and queer and transgender workers face the brunt of
precarious economics (worsened by the too-damn-high-rent) – making slightly-better, cash and
mostly-untaxed pay, and occasional free cannabis a better proposition than most service labor.
Workers’ reliance on these basic benefits is, in turn, wielded by managers, owners and even
patients to force them to submit to all kinds of abuses, from direct sexual violence to a climate of
control in some shops to an underlying subordination.
But the story does not stop there. The fundamentally relational nature that undergirds such
cannabis labor is not only a conduit for (self-)exploitation as some scholars of intimate labor
emphasize (Mears 2015). Instead, turning to the relational uncovers the compassion, care and
mutuality that form the basis of alternative politics and other forms of collective and individual
value. Such relationships have to be understood as responsive to the violence wrought by the
HIV/AIDS crisis on queer and transgender people discussed in Chapter 2, as well as
interconnected set of traumas and unmet needs in the US in the early 21
st
Century that
accompany cannabis’ medical boom and “adult-use” shift in California. Cannabis care points to
the necessities for social reproduction in an era of a state that invests in punishment over social
protection, and has actively abandoned large swaths of population.
Shop-floor labor relations were both structured by criminalization in the risks and challenges
of policing, but also informed by populations affected by carceral systems and social
disinvestment - helping produce a kind of fugitive care practice that did not easily fit into
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dominant forms of health or service labor. The value accrued went beyond driving profits from
shop owners or allowing the maintenance of an unequal racial capitalist system. They also
offered far less measurable forms of enjoyment, including of creating and even appreciating the
occasional flirting, and fulfilled a desire to create better, to rectify and heal past harms in their
own communities, whether it was that harassment experienced by other women and queer people
of color or the scars of poverty and unhoused life.
Such fugitive care informed a complex political consciousness and engagement, to both
preserve and improve the conditions in which they gained such value. The relationships young
budtenders and cannabis retail workers built became vital to moments of solidarity to face down
controlling bosses, harassing customers, and other violence that stands counter to a project of
care, survival and reimagining value. Their connections become a critical fuel for labor
movements, intersecting with the deepening power of these movements locally, as much as an
experimentation ground for a certain politics of abolition and mutual support, albeit one tenuous
and always-in-the making, embedded in longer histories of Black and queer survival (cf .
Hartman 2019). Fugitive cannabis care reminds us that the power workers hold is not solely
produced in relationship to generating or withholding labor-value convertible to profit; it is often
sparked in the connections among each other, to consumers, and to management, all of which
can crystallize into action in the right conjunctures.
The Intimacy of Labor and its Diversity
More than 150 years of Marxist theory has honed in on the idea that the turn to a wage
system under capitalism is one that alienates us from our humanity, compelling whole classes of
people to give up the work from which they derive meaning in exchange for simple wages. In
this relationship, the “worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels
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outside himself” (Marx and Engels 1932:74). If we fast forward to when service labor became
the dominant relationship in the economy in the 1970s and 1980s, sociologists of labor such as
Arlie Hochschild told us that beyond losing the craft relation, emotional workers had to alienate
themselves from their own selves, to “[manage] feeling to create a publicly observable facial and
bodily display” (2003). Hochschild’s perennial example is the airline stewardess, who must
basically separate (her)self from her emotions – you perform a personal relationship not
necessarily out of a sense of care but out of a need for compensation. Such leads to different,
often framed as “immaterial” burdens than a back-breaking wage-week on the line in a factory –
or to take it back to Marx, to losing one’s craft. Caitlin echoes this price of emotional labor when
she explained the fatigue that sets in after a day of intensive interactions.
With the shift to a neoliberal economy in the 1970s, the commodification of labor and
everyday relations expanded globally to whole categories of intimate labor defined by Parrenas,
Thai and Silvey: “the work of forging, sustaining, nurturing, maintaining, and managing
interpersonal ties, as well as the work of tending to the sexual, bodily, health, hygiene, and care
needs of individuals” (Parreñas et al. 2016:3). Patient consultants, budtenders, and other
cannabis medical-retail workers perform this textbook definition: They build individualized
relationships with their “patients,” through helping them identify how cannabis would serve to
alleviate symptoms of any number of major illnesses, which historically have been terminal,
from HIV/AIDS to cancer or life-long, debilitating conditions like epilepsy. Symptoms can
include seizures, nausea, lack of appetite, bodily pain, and insomnia. They also lend a friendly
ear that puts them face to face with traumas like sexual violence. And through it all, they are of
course, paid a wage – which was quite low in some shops.
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Focusing on intimate rather than just emotional or service labor writ large responds to
Marxist feminist critiques that such emotional-level involves a wholesale engagement with
critical issues of bodily and material survival, rather than solely “immaterial” production
(Federici 2012). In this case, cannabis workers are asked to be more than a smiling face; they are
engaging head on with physical and mental health, coping with traumas produced by racialized
and gendered capitalism, and in many ways giving people a material way to show up to work or
to life – in other words, social reproduction.
In alignment with a global division of intimate labor and its commodification globally,
cannabis retail workers are mostly Latinx, Black and API women, often queer and transgender
(Boris and Parreñas 2010; Mountz and Hyndman 2006). Most research on service and intimate
labor alike, though, starts from an understanding that much of what racialized and gendered
workers do in this work is either coercively enforced by systems like national migration regimes
or embedded in the ways workers convince themselves to cope with their reality (Lan 2006;
Parreñas 2001). Whether it’s hotel workers who enact their own class hierarchies for a fantasy
they will never touch upon described by Rachel Sherman (2007), or Ashley Mear’s (2015) work
on unpaid promotion girls, service labor is often talked about in how low-wage workers convince
ourselves to self-exploit. Parreñas complicated this by blurring the lines between coercion and
consent, and the literature on sex work is probably the most explicit in suggesting that workers
might have more autonomy than either scholars, policymakers or certain carceral feminists
imagine (Bernstein 2012; Parreñas 2011). Still, the focus is often how (mostly women’s)
consent over their body under intimate labor regimes are pretty much in service of coercive,
extractive capitalist relations.
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Feminist geographers and Latinx and Black radical scholars have also pointed to more
expansive ways in which care labor can operate, both within and beyond commodified labor,
from mutual aid to in-home child care among workfare recipients (Gibson-Graham 2006;
Hayden 1982; Hwang 2019; Morrow and Parker 2020; Nembhard 2014; Valles 2015b). Rather
than identifying this intimate labor as the hardest part of the job, dozens I spoke to in cannabis
dispensaries described it as the reason they show up for work. The care, compassion and
personal ties they built with their clients were critical to their perception and commitment to their
labor – and to how they accrued more incommensurate value. In fact, intensive care relations
came out often from efforts by budtenders, cannabis consultants and other shop-floor workers to
offer more, when confronted with a multiplicity of social problems from undiagnosed illness to
unhoused status to economic and social stress. Part of it has to do how many were shaped queer
and Black diasporic histories of cannabis and the ways such care and compassion are “baked in”
through the development of medical Cannabis Buyer Clubs. But part of it also was a work-in-
progress, an evolving set of responses to changing conditions.
To recuperate care as a ground for multiple forms of fugitive value and politics does not
forego attention to the ways in which this labor is still being done and driven by marginalized,
often queer and women workers. Indeed, the demographics of this workforce are also reflective
of employers’ recruitment of hire young women of color to attend to male fantasies, and to
benefit from labor assumed to be more pliable and controllable. The non-consensual
sexualization echoes long histories of intimate labor exploitation of racialized women from the
colonial era to the present, from enslavement to the global division of labor (Davis 1972;
Gutierrez-Rodriguez 2014; Hartman 2016, 2019; Nakano Glenn 1992, 2004). While in some
places managers and owners came from a political standpoint where they encouraged care and
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mutuality, in others they rarely saw customers as more than a source of revenue, and encouraged
workers to do what they could to “get tips” – preying particularly on budtenders’ economic
precarity and need for a cash wage. While fugitivity opened the door to creativity, the
criminalization of cannabis and the arbitrary lines wrought by punitive regulation in the medical
marijuana era heightened exploitation and made this care labor more burdensome and riskier.
Small-scale and informal, cannabis workplaces have been varied, complicated, and messy,
without any sort of unifying corporate ideology or even coherent training in the same way, for
example, that mainstream retail and hospitality (cf. Otis 2011; Williams and Connell 2010). This
makes it hard to essentialize the labor as either solely commercial transactions or altogether
rooted in care. What we can see, though, is the ways in which the relational aspect that Mears
(2015) sees as an essential aspect of intimate labor becomes a critical nexus of value generation
and power in the workplace. In Mears’ study of club promotion, the gendered and racialized
intimate relationships were all controlled by management and for profit (cf. 2015). In the
cannabis case, relationships could be and were exploited to force others to work more, or a
conduit to sexual violence. In other words, they were at times used to drain more value and turn
that time and energy into profit for business owners and others in the supply chain. But they also
become a means to build solidarities against the tactics and control of management, the violence
of sexual harassment and other forms of abuse. They became a critical conduit for internal
organizing and resistance, especially in a context where policing and state violence restricted
formal channels for action.
A view from the dispensary floor remaps the market to show how its overall path became
dependent on care and interpersonal relationships, that accrued value for workers, operators, and
the whole supply chain in multiple ways. These fugitive forms of care also informed how
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workers claimed and organized towards power – and why some viewed legalization as an
opportunity to codify some of these practices and better protect themselves and their patients. At
the same time, few idealized how further formalization might threaten these fugitive circuits of
value – upend them, commercialize them, and even shut many out. Such projects place cannabis
retail labor into a broader historical stream, reflecting histories of Black survival and queer
formations with which Sadiya Hartman so deftly engages that exist in counter-position to
criminalization (2019). Like its historical antecedents, this work of mutual support was always
under threat, ever tenuous, and always something in the making.
“All of them are here for help”
Elina was one of the newer workers hired at the shop Mariana helms, probably about 7 or 8
years younger than her manager (and so in her mid-20s). Her dyed-reddish hair brightened her
smiles and attentive eyes, and her black plug earrings stood out behind both. Before heading to
some meetings at CP, I stopped in the shop floor to deal with some of my own family needs. I
asked her what she would recommend for an elderly person struggling with terminal cancer,
thinking in this case of my partner’s father (and thinking, too, of family I had lost). I understood
at this point the mix of CBD and THC was necessary but also feared exposing him to too many
other chemicals or were untested. She exuded a palpable empathy, facilitated by a shy, nervous
laugh that disarmed you. “So,” she sighed, the main goal for cancer treatment via cannabis, as
she knew it, was beating out the appetite suppression and nausea wrought by chemotherapy and
the anxiety produced by the often-terminal illness.
She led me across three glass counter areas to the other wall, where I squinted to see her
with the falling late-day LA sunlight. Out of the glass came three dropper-bottles in dark amber
glass, each the same size and off-white-blue branded box (a relative novelty). These were
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tinctures. Each ration of THC to CBD was progressively higher, she explained. “This one helped
me through a lot, I started slow but it gave me the appetite, I had to eat even if I didn’t want to.”
She didn’t want to, often, because she was struggling with an eating disorder, among other
significant trauma and mental health struggles. But she got to the right dosage, and with it has
been doing better. “Day by day,” she laughed. I smiled, a shared laughter, a little louder this
time. To break the tension, we talked of what she loved to eat when her appetite came back.
For a moment, too, cancer and the thought of hospices and death did not weigh as much. She
recommended starting mid-range, as the lowest THC dose often had little effect on the strong
mental strains my father-in-law was likely facing, and it wouldn’t be enough to take on the
sickness brought on by chemo. I trusted her advice, and bought two small vials easy enough for
my father-in-law to sneak past his wife, who would probably not approve.
As we shared this rather intimate, not-so-alienated moment of shared traumas and laughter
we were surrounded by six other people, budtenders and customers exchanging dialogue along
the three glass counters squeezed in a “U” of metal and glass. There were also three waiting
patients in chairs at the far wall. The space itself was no bigger than a few hundred square feet,
cut in the middle by a pillar where bright advertisements for different cannabis vapes, lotions and
other products hung, images more sci-fi than tie-dye. Another budtender and her patient were
laughing a third, an elderly woman with a young Latina budtender teaching her how to bring a
small vaporizing pen on a plane. Some conversations were less serious; others more so. Given
that medical cannabis had been pushed to the edges of legality and outside of the formalized
health system, US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-mandated
privacy rules were often absent. No one complained though, as you didn’t actually have to share;
something about this space made people want to do so.
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Between the waiting room and shop floor, it’s easy to see the diversity Mariana spoke of,
from young Latinx and Black men from the neighborhood, eyes averted (always shrugging their
shoulders, she says), the “yoga pants” crowd, the “Hollywood” ones, those visibly struggling
with disabilities and illness, a solemn quiet that betrays any image of cannabis you would get
from mainstream media. I’ve spent time since I was young in quite a few public health clinics
and their full waiting rooms; this did not feel so different – maybe even quieter.
At a store a few freeway interchanges north, another dispensary, Health Fundamentals (HF),
a little more set apart from a strip mall, with more echoes of a clinic. Here, the budtenders are
called consultants; one enters in to a quiet, grey-blue room. Unlike CP, patients are not sharing
the entry way with the receptionist and a TV flickering (volume low) with rotations of stand-up
comedy and stoner flicks. Instead, one has to come up to receive a private intake their first time
and fill out a comprehensive chart with your medical information. As a patients wait, they can
read through extensive descriptions of strains, with each’s THC and CBD content and effects.
The cannabis purchasing area was a little more spacious, a little less glass and advertisements,
though the minimalist look was punctuated by a live cannabis plant, some books on marijuana,
including the famous (in these circles) Cannabis Pharmacy by Michael Backus. The floor was
still shared among patients, spread across three glass display cases with flower and tinctures.
Everything is sparkling clean, sanitized but still some bursts of color and information on posters
from emerging cannabis companies or on the labels and bottles. Maybe it was the time of day I
often went to visit shops, the room still happened to glisten as the LA light hit the trees outside.
I sat down with Leo, Melinna and Angelica in the behind-the-scenes room where the product
is sorted and stored in massive safes, and where the business happens. Leo and Melinna were in
their late 30s and early 40s to Angelica, probably no older than 27. All of them identified as
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Latinx; all started as patients and at some point jumped the counter to become consultants. And
their patient relationship was longer even than their work in the shop: eight years for Angelica,
six for Melinna, and both had worked about three years there. “It was either that or go to my
neighbor,” Melinna laughed “And this is much better than whatever my neighbor has.” She had
been out of work, raising her kids with her partner for several years; in fact, she would pick up
while her son played soccer down the street. But as several of them got older, income was
necessary, as was getting out of the house. “One day, [the manager], pulled me aside and was
like, are you ready to back to work? Come work here.”
Leo had been in the work much longer than Melinna, and started “making bongs, ceramic
items early on, doing what I did, not knowing there is cannabinoids.”
17
Angelica was a cultivator
who also made cannabis extract lotions, when all of a sudden the market starting changing:
“Okay, now, it’s a storefront – and when I had the opportunity, I was like this will be awesome,
it’s all medicinal, it’s all helping people those type of ways.”
Those “type of ways” included a broad reach of therapeutic applications that seem to
represent all the floors in your average US hospital, along with a wide dosage of what could best
be described as self-care. Leo explained, “In one day, you get everything from, ‘I just need
something to be creative’ to ‘I have a mass in the center of my head and they can’t take it out or
seem to resolve it - I want a better life.’ There are also people with terminal situations. All of
these conversations are intimate, involve a lot of empathy and we have to bring that every day.”
I couldn’t stop my eyes from flaring up when he says, “Mass in the center of my head.” He
saw my not-so-disguised shock and doubled down: “No, for reals, a mass that wasn’t a tumor,

17
Explained further in Chapter 3, cannabanoids are a class of compounds in humans (endocannabanoids) and plants
(phytocannabanoids, particularly in cannabis). THC and CBD are two major types of the compounds and are said to
uniquely react with the human endaocannabanoid system to create particular neurological and psychological effects
(McPartland, Guy, and Di Marzo 2014).
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and it just showed up there and wasn’t going away.” Cannabis labor places these young
budtenders in the forefront of a wide range of health and medical crises, that many treat with a
certain openness and interest, though few have any formal medical training. “It’s fucking
fantastic,” Leo continued about the varied “demographic” that he meets. “You meet an 8-year
old with a feeding tube, a 98-year old women with the driver. All of them are here for help – it’s
really intense where you have to be compassionate or somewhere else.”
Handling everything from terminal cancer in the elderly to people’s everyday mental health
stresses requires a certain amount of emotional labor, one that involves mustering up an ability to
connect with others at a human level. Angelica shared, “The conversations are intimate, involve
a lot of empathy and you [as a budtender] bring that every day.” It is exhausting, emotive and
tiring – as Caitlin described, leading to feelings and desires to just smoke after work. For Leo,
the shop-floor provided a strong counter-space to one where social media dominated, forcing far
more “dynamic” face-to-face affective landscapes punctuated by compassion, joy, sadness.
The key is in Leo’s reference to “compassion.” The relationships between patients and
budtenders or other front-line workers in the dispensaries was a deeper kind of transaction –
what Gibson-Graham refer to as an “ethics of care” or compassion (2006). In nearly every
interview conducted, “the patients,” “the clients” or “the compassionate work” were often the
primary reason interlocutors cited for continuing in this labor, despite the risks and challenges.
Though the language of patients was common, the relationships of care, much like the health
knowledge produced stray from those produced in mainstream medical settings or in a
hierarchical relationship (described in more detail in Chapter 3). Compassion, here, requires an
engagement with all kinds of material realities, including basic survival in a precarious economy
laden with all kinds of violence and inequality. In some cases, like the rape survivor with which
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Mariana tended to and listened, it was not so much about selling more products as it was helping
patients navigate the use of cannabis.
The space of the dispensary, inherited from the CBCs, facilitated a kind of “community”
economy Gibson-Graham describe – indexing “face-to-face, human, small-scale, caring, and
above all local” connections (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 86). Non-institutional, fugitive care in
cannabis opened the door for a host of relationships rooted in seeing others in vulnerable states;
those others went far beyond people with terminal illness over time. Such exchanges helped
bring more people to cannabis and created repeat relationships for shops – in other words,
driving sales and value for the shops. Both budtenders and their managers and operators gained
in numerous ways from these relationships.
Even with the risks, burdens, and extraction of value, like many budtenders I spoke to, Leo
seems energized by these relationships and moments of care and compassion that are not easily
quantifiable or reduced to a wage relationship. In part, this may be because they were generating
other forms of value, aesthetic, emotional and otherwise that kept them also showing up.
Face Front to Trauma
Yet it’s important to recognize where and how this care arises, and contextualize such value-
generation in relation to dispossession and abandonment by the neoliberal state in California (cf.
Gilmore 2007; di Leonardo 2008). Several workers recognize the trends that unite them and their
different patients, threaded by a set of needs but also a common set of exclusions. Dani, a 29-
year old transgender Filipino, came to later-stage dispensary and cultivation spaces in the hopes
to engage in healing that can explicitly serve marginalized communities. He surmised cannabis
use is high among LGBTQ people, particularly in low-income communities, because it is a
viable instrument to “self-medicate.” He explained: “We are all coping with trauma, whether we
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admit it or not. Especially queer folks.” This of course speaks to the queer histories of medical
marijuana, but workers like Dani also saw this applicable to marginalized communities of color
more broadly.
Numerous budtenders echoed Dani’s point and talked about how, while they may not have
been aware initially, using cannabis was part of a mental health practice, something that was not
always easy to name, in Los Angeles’ unequal neoliberal economy where such services were
often inaccessible, stigmatized, or altogether absent.
18
Leo shared more about how he first got
involved in cannabis work and us: “It was a mental health thing for me – kind of stabilize,” he
pauses. “Following those notions, you learn what is a good mind-state, you keep seeking that
out.” The space of the dispensary floor is laden with these mental health struggles. “For some
people, they are so excited to come – it gives them clarity to start their day,” Melinna explained.
“For this with that kind of anxiety, it starts their runoff.” Indeed, for patients with terminal illness
or mental health challenges their time in the waiting room and shop-floor or show-room of
cannabis dispensaries may be their only interaction outside their home – which might give us a
sense of why these spaces at times are so quiet and altogether solemn at times. It was often also
many low-income people’s only option for mental or physical health care, in the context of
organized abandonment. This was especially true given the decimation of mental health clinics
since the 1980s and the overall privatization of primary care (a much longer story), all of which
were exacerbated in the Great Recession’s mass unemployment and austerity (Chen et al. 2014;
Holahan 2011; Nobari et al. 2018).

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Studies show both the expansion of mental health needs nationwide during and after the Great Recession,
especially among low-income populations, while statewide show Los Angeles County has among the highest rates
of unmet mental health needs compared to the rest of the state (Eberhart et al. 2019; Forbes and Krueger 2019)
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On the clinic floor at HF on another day, I was guided through the daily rounds by a young,
wispy-haired budtender, probably one of the few young white men I meet working on the floor at
a dispensary. He was thin enough where his bones protruded under a loose shirt, and he told me
that he too was a patient here and loved this place. He faced crippling depression and anxiety that
made social situations near-impossible to survive, and started to come to the shop when he found
that the street-deals he relied upon were less and less reliable. “I came here and started to really
learn the science behind it, and I was like this is the job I want to do, I want to help people in my
same situation.” His laughter and confidence – and the fact he must interact with hundreds of
people throughout the day make it hard to imagine how he felt some years ago, before the
collective. He was willing to take such risks not only to get medicine and a wage, but for the
sake of others – he was gaining strength and healing.
The empathy that many mentioned, or the compassion, is thus grounded in personal, kin and
community sociality – linked to workers’ and owners’ relationship beyond the shop-floor. This
seems like an obvious point, considering many are recruited from the patient-position, but it’s an
important one, in that it affects what and how they treat the cannabis sales and consulting
relationship. And it traces back to some extent to Peron and other CBC’s operator’s decisions to
hire patients with HIV/AIDS or terminal illness as staff, given how they understood the realities
(noted in Chapter 2).
It was also not always about a worker’s own health issues, either. Melinna expounded, “You
meet someone and here their struggle, and you think, my aunt is dealing with something like that
– I hope she is not so much pain - you put yourselves in their situation, and feel them.” Where
they may not feel a direct relation to themselves or close kin or friends, workers also describe
wanting to create a space for other marginalized communities. As I am interviewing her at a
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local cafe, Valeria, a 21-year old Mexican-Salvadoran budtender, points to a sketch on the wall
of the break room of an older Black man in a nearby street, with a shopping cart. It’s an artist
picture, presumably meant to highlight experiences of homelessness: “That guy, he lives on the
streets out here and comes in her when we can, we help him out with medicine. These are the
people that society has shut out – homeless folks, elderly and sick folks. We feel a connection to
them.” Dispensaries not only welcomed patients “shut out” from mainstream institutions, but
many continued to provide free cannabis to unhoused and poor clients, in the tradition of the
CBCs (recent regulation limited this, but patients and workers organized to allow this).
Coming from a position where one already identifies with the patients which whom they
work might explain why commodification of cannabis – or the desire to up-sell clients – was
tempered. That connection is furthered by a shared criminalization for the plant, even under the
medical legal regime, where a raid could happen at any moment, where you could be stopped for
smoking or lose your house or your livelihood. That did not mean that many did not drive sales
at times (especially under certain management regimes) or help bring patients to a wider
diversity of products; it just meant it was done in a way that was not always bound up in the
pressures of sales-oriented marketing, and with certain empathy and interrelation.
Motivated by these commonalities of fugitivity might have influenced the constant desire to
give up their extra, off-work time and emotions [what Gibson-Graham (2006) in fact call
“fugitive energies”] to researching different conditions and applications (Gibson-Graham 2006).
Again, these were to the benefit of the wider industry and operations – detailed further in the
next chapter. It most definitely informed their willingness to survive the risks of semi-licit status,
and to often find ways to “hook up” patients in need as best they could through their momentary
shared exchanges.
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Workers’ advocacy for free medicine programs with their employers (or getting patients this
informally), or their empathetic and collaborative engagement beyond what their wage or tips
afford, hint to the possibilities of care through a lens of mutual aid. Transgender law activist and
movement scholar Dean Spade describes such aid as “antihierarchical social relations of material
care through a political and participatory praxis” (Hwang 2019:564; Spade 2020). The (radically)
relational, Ren-Yo-Hwang explains, is key in such practice, often grounded in queer and
transgender Black and indigenous QTBIPOC communities: there is no impulse to simply “drop
in, detach from, or extract otherness” and orients instead to a “collective project of care”
(2019:570; C. J. Cohen 1997). It’s a fundamentally queer relationality that moves beyond
“diagnosing and curing” based in relating to, first and foremost, shared experiences that include
being both treated as and embracing a certain “deviant” status (a kind of care that destabilizes
many biological categories and health practices, as Chapter 3 discusses) (Hwang 2019: 570).
In this case, not only did those marked deviant find ways to generate care, but they had to
(and sometimes chose to) do so in a way that was barely-sanctioned by the state. Budtenders and
patients’ mutual frustrations engendered experiments with new forms of care and at times
invertedly, placed workers at the front lines of meeting the needs of those left out from more
institutional state and market systems of support. In some ways, and perhaps contradictorily, the
depth and expansive nature of the needs they met helped the market expand, and enlivened new
circuits of value.
Interdependence in a Time of Precarity
Cannabis labor as a practice of interdependence and mutuality provides an important level of
complexity to the story that service labor just grows out of a failure of manufacturing in the US,
and a blanket “feminization of global labor” (cf. Mills 2014). That’s not to say there were not
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structural economic factors pushing young, predominantly female-identified women of color into
the informal sector, but relatively well paying – and in cash – job. Unemployment was still high
and in fact growing, moving from 8.7 to 9.0% among workers of color between 2010 and 2015,
and in 2014, more than 15% of Black residents, 11% of those who identify as mixed and 14% of
Native Americans were not working, compared to 9% of white residents (PolicyLink/Program
for Environmental and Regional Equity 2017). Working also was far from a guarantee to better
outcomes: In the years that cannabis dispensary presence grew in the 2010s, so did the racial
wage gap in Los Angeles (Program for Environmental and Regional Equity and PolicyLink
2016). This had expanded across the 1980s but even as factors like a $15 minimum wage were
setting in, non-white workers were losing ground. Black and Latinx US-born and immigrant
populations alike were behind in educational and skills training attainment, a barrier to entry into
higher-wage, formal sector jobs (Ibid.)
Budtenders’ stories reflected realities where they many were altogether absent from the
formal sector for most of their life (like Leo), bounced low-wage work such as Walgreens to
retail clothing to grocery, or faced longer-term unemployed in and post-Great Recession. Others
also describe the active barriers that stopped them from other options. Dani, a 20-something
Filipina transgender man who, after being unable to get even low-wage service or office work
due to his gender presentation, sought out sex work. When that became even more policed
online, he turned to cannabis. The medical marijuana economy offered escape from all of these.
The paths that lead to cannabis work were connected to a broader California landscape of
racialized and gendered inequality, one being reshaped by the structural and political earthquakes
and aftershocks of the housing and financial crises. Workers like Melissa came to Los Angeles
from the Central Valley, and others from the Riverside and San Bernardino County, seeking
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some kind of better option (including community college classes) throughout the 2010s. Many
needed to make enough to support not only themselves but their unemployed, ill, or elder parents
in these exurban and rural regions scarred with dispossession, some of whom were experiencing
chronic homelessness or unemployment in the context of the recession. The wages offered in a
dispensary during the time I charted, which ranged from $8 to 10 at the lowest range and less-
desirable shops (described in some detail below), to some making upwards of $12, 15, or even
20, not including tips. (This informs Mariana’s ability to get a few rounds of drinks, as an even
more well paid shop-floor manager). For some context, this is a key moment where labor groups
were converging to win a $15 minimum wage that would start at $10.50 in 2016. Pay was also in
cash, meaning that taxes (benefitting an already-distrusted government) could be circumvented.
Getting paid with cannabis occasionally, while an egregious labor violation, was not always
disliked by those who both consumed and knew where to re-sell it for even more money.
Valeria saw that some dispensary owners took advantage of the precarious economic reality.
“I think some think, it’s easy to get Latinas whose families don’t make much money,” she
explained, and the fact “many Latinas don’t see a future” and need to meet immediate needs for
themselves and others made the dispensary a decent option. She added, it was in fact far better
than working for even lower wages for a large corporation, to be then taxed and have no benefits
from the state, and cannabis also allowed just enough flexibility for many young workers to also
attend school and hold other aspirations.
The result of this influx of people pushed out of other industries or seeking slightly-better
pay, including the large numbers of patients who jumped the counter, undergirds the possibilities
of empathy. It further shortened the distance between budtenders and patients. The breadth of
cannabis clients– as Mariana’s initial comments revealed and free and discounted medicine
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helped made possible – represented a wide diversity of social backgrounds, but include many
working class or poor people, often people of color who toiled in Los Angeles’ plantation
economy. (This, of course, varies in location, but even in wealthier neighborhoods like Venice,
the clientele and workers alike included residents from a range of backgrounds, especially pre-
2018 legalization launch). Budtenders and consultants – whether they started with them or not -
often understood their relationships to patients and each other have a deeper political and social
significance, including offering shared moments of escape from the weight of the systemic
violence of dispossession that drove them to the work in the industry. While cash played a factor,
so too did an intimate understanding of the experiences of some of Los Angeles’ most vulnerable
populations, who as medical marijuana was expanding and the recession deepening, were only
seeing heightened inequality and more collective precarity.
Working for the Boys
While responding to structural economic realities, like in this case racialized under- and
unemployment, service and emotional labor has been well documented as shaped by – from the
colonial to the contemporary era – racial and gendered imaginaries certain workers are expected
to perform in certain ways to reinforce hierarchies and boundaries (Kang 2010; Parreñas 2011;
Wharton 2009). These exchanges create certain feelings of class and prestige, whether it’s
subservience by an Asian nail salon worker or getting waited on by light-skinned people of color
(Kang 2010; Wilson 2018; Zukin 1993). Across many dispensaries, it’s no accident that women
of color are particularly recruited by some shopowners, amidst Los Angeles’ many precarious
workers to fulfill their own heterosexist visions of servile, caring women who bring men weed.
“Back in the day, in some shops, it turned into a thing where you had to turn your photo in
with your resume,” Susan, a white lesbian woman in her 60s who has owned several
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dispensaries, explained. Susan refused to acquiesce to what became an industry norm in the late
2000s, asking for headshots with resumes through online sites like Craigslist. Rubi, one
budtender from a Venice dispensary shared similar experiences of watching her bosses cultivate
a sexualized workforce. She had long hair down her back, thin, tattoos; many of her co-workers
were light-skinned. They often wore short loose summer dresses and shorts, string tank tops. The
choice of these outfits wasn’t fully by choice, and in some shops, several budtenders shared
(verbatim) that their managers told them they “knew how to get tips.” Adriana described,
ironically, that one owner described it as “using her girl power.”
Since the mid-2000s, many dispensaries came to be owned and operated by straight,
cisgendered men (white and of color). Some of these owners brought in certain elements of
another more heteronormative culture surrounding cannabis from the 1990s, that involved the
sexualization of women. “Despite the reality, a lot of the industry makes their choices with a
demographic of 18 to 26 year old boys in mind,” Susan lamented. Melissa was far blunter: “I
don’t know what it is, if these boys grew up watching movies of all these drug dealers with
naked girls holding the cocaine for them and think it’s the same thing here.” The emphasis is on
boys, and empty servitude, a complaint that women shop operators also echoed.
But some of those cannabis boys end up working on the other side of the counter, and
gendering of cannabis labor is far from uniform, as the diversity of Cornerstone betrays: I met
many workers who identified as male, were transgender, and across the board, women workers
did not fit a singular image. Some workers attributed this lack of uniformity to cannabis
“culture” as well, a mishmash of images attached to the plant from hip-hop to punk to hippy-
ness. But I found that the diversity in labor was more produced a structural and geographical
fact: an informal industry tied to a multiplicity of social relations and movements, and to the
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webs of people across different neighborhoods who came to cannabis, through their relationships
to each other, to the plant, and to an economic system that was failing to provide opportunities
for vast swaths of Los Angeles. I discuss the complex geography of where shops landed in
Chapter 5, but often both customers and patients were in a relative proximity to the shops, and
thus reflective of LA’s quite complex neighborhood demographics.
Snitches Get Stitches, and other Silences
The shared vulnerability and fugitive status among workers, while often informing empathy
and compassionate practices with each other and patients, could also become a road to
exploitation. Such mistreatment was only heightened in the context of criminalization, which
figures directly into the complexities of cannabis labor and how care and compassion are
enacted. At 19, Adriana quit her job at Walgreens – actually in the heart of downtown. It was a
struggle because on top of having to meet corporate-set sales expectations, she was verbally
abused and “harassed” be her manager. She brought it to the owner, who ignored her. Fed up,
she quit without a plan. Like many others, the suggestion actually came from across the counter,
from a place where she would “pick up often.” “We noticed you,” one of the other girls told her.
“You always come in with your juice.” She was a little weirded out by that comment. “Um,
okay.” But, a job was a job, and this was a job in a place she knew well and to which she had
some affinity.
She signed up for it, and “they told me to show up the next day and start as a volunteer.”
Once her training was over, they promised to pay her the wages for the time of training and start
her as a real employee. The “girls” on the floor led her through most of the back-end work that
most shops took on pre-legalization: “Here, weigh out this kief, roll these joints, sorts these
papers. All the girls were the budtenders and I was the one doing everything extra.” What she
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realized was that the “girls” were overwhelmed, and taking on far too much work. The managers
were rarely around.
After several weeks on the job, the managers told Adriana they were going to give her an
official schedule soon, after which she waited, with no call. She went in the next day to get some
free weed and her schedule. “The security guard was like, you were supposed to show up.” She
was suddenly fired from a job that she never officially got paid or hired for. “It was really shady
– what? I was just used…I was ready to start working and I just never got paid for 3 weeks of
training. I felt like I was going to get the job – and then they took advantage.”
She was not the only to share about these volunteer or internship schemes, and from this
particular shop as well. A year after Adriana and I met, the union got a call from a young mixed
genderqueer person, Eli, who shared that they, too, had been dragged into this “volunteer”
scheme. Eli started to organize her fellow co-workers to get their stories and came to us fired up
to act. We met in the East LA library and talked wage theft and the possibilities for action. She
had done significant documenting of the workplace conditions, taken photos of the employee
manuals that they found buried, and showed the scraps of papers that were supposed to calculate
all the product she had helped trim, that was supposed to be paid to her by the piece-rate. They
were not sure, though, what to do with the evidence, unsure how to navigate the wage claim
system and the state and local bureaucracy.
But ultimately, Eli was locked in by the fact that the wage theft process in California was
slow and ultimately required the ability to conduct legal action against the business itself. Eli was
torn – if the case advanced, then a business could be shut down or face police action. Eli and the
other workers might also face retaliation. Like the saying goes (and one I heard more than a few
times), “Snitches get stitches.”
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The stitches were not just coming from the owners. They were coming from the state and
police. Eli knew workers most of the time bore the brunt of raids, a fact particularly heightened
with the shift towards a fully-legalized market. Vulnerable workers in the underground market
were treated with the same, if not a harsher, punitive lens than shopowners, though some I talked
to had no clue how to find work in a “legitimate” shop or whether the owner’s claim of having a
license was true or not.
Both Adriana and Eli saw the kinds of relationships they held turned on them: they were
brought in through their affinities to the industry, and found themselves among overworked,
exhausted coworkers who were willing to turn a blind eye in exchange for survival. The
exploitation, like other aforementioned service labor, often included that most basic of capitalist
trade-offs: workers were expected to give up their own rights to their body in exchange for a
wage. This story is all-too common in public narratives about cannabis, sensationalized in stories
of sex trafficking and disappeared women tied to Northern California cultivation sites (see,
Netflix’s Murder Mountain (2018).)
The story was far less dramatic and far less interesting to the public in budtending, perhaps
because it was more on the line of the routinization of sexual harassment in Hollywood, in the
music industry, in hotel work or many other US workplaces that defined the LA economy. “The
owners were super machista. They felt like they owned us – like sexual predators,” Valeria
shared. At 18 years old, she had “no idea” what to expect or what her rights were. “Payday was
the scariest. You were like: what are they going to want from me for this check?” She felt like
she had “no idea” what was really going on, or how to get out of there. It became increasingly
clear that there was not much hope of help from the other workers, two of whom were in a love
triangle with the owner-operator.
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Across town, in East LA, Eli’s bosses, too, made clear what it would mean to stay in her job.
The bosses would offer rides, hinting that it would come with expectations of sexual favors. In
Venice, too, the same story, so much so that Rubi was willing to go on camera to share when I
worked on a video production on Latinxs in the cannabis industry. “Being a Latina budtender, in
some places when you’re hired they pretty just want you to be a pretty face, just collect the
money and hand out the weed,” she shared to our film team. “I’ve left places because they either
expect places you are going to do more than what the job entails, or I’ve been let go in places
because I won’t do what other women are doing.”
Recourse to even basic labor protections was rendered impossible: as Rubi said, “When this
happens, you have no one to go to. You can’t go to the cops, because they will laugh at you. You
can’t go to the city, because they are trying to kick [your shop] out.” In some cases, both will
converge and the budtenders can even find themselves arrested. Criminalization facilitated
practices like rampant sexual violence and fake internships that went nowhere for some workers,
yet sustained profits for shop-owners. It allowed for drawing from the good intentions and
interpersonal connections built on the shop floor, much in the same way that exploitative
domestic and reproductive labor is aided by the policing of migrant women globally
(Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Lan 2006; Parreñas 2001). Care and compassion, in other words,
could also be turned on its head, interdependence hollowed into dependence, a reminder of the
contingency of fugitive economies, inseparable ultimately from broader historical and
geographical relations of racialized and gendered violence.
“We’re Here to Break Free”
In a pre-#metoo era, in a context where human relations were few and far between and
unions just coming on the scene, and most importantly, where police violence encouraged
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silence, workers struggled with the blunt coercive force of their managers and bosses in some
sites. Walking away from cannabis altogether is not so easy, as Rubi detailed, not just because
the money is needed, but because she wanted to continue “to help people – people with cancer,
with epilepsy” and her own young daughter, who was suffering from a rare condition of
gastroschisis where the intestines are originally born outside the body.
But, during the height of the medical marijuana economy in the 2010s in Los Angeles, you
could keep take your labor and keep walking, until you found the right space that might fit with
the values of mutuality and care. Rubi jumped from shop to shop. While Valeria walked on thin
ice around the violence of her managers, contemplating whether to return to less-lucrative and
equally harassment-filled retail, Mariana, whose shop was down the street came by several times.
In some ways, she may have been scoping out the competition, but she also didn’t like what she
saw. Mariana offered her a way out. “She let me know it could be much better.”
It’s important to note that at the shop Mariana recruited her to was not wholly devoid of
sexualization. Sexual intimacy versus sexual harassment or violence is complex and has
everything to do with the autonomy of workers to define their relationships to their bodies.
Mariana described appreciation of other women’s attention at the space - something she boasted
about at times. “They come in all the time and are trying to flirt with her: the girls. They love
her,” Caitlin described in yet another late-night, post work debrief.
Mariana laughed and described appreciation of the women’s attention, but she quickly
became serious about consensual sexual attention and avoiding dating her patients. She and
coworkers protect each other from unwanted sexualized comments (often from cisgendered men)
or other forms of “disrespect.” Caitlin described another incident earlier in the day, where a
customer berated one of the women who work behind the cannabis counter.
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Caitlin shared Mariana’s reaction: “I was like if you are going to talk like that, get out.
Second time I heard you talking to one of my girls like that and I was like no, get out if you are
going to be like that.”
Mariana later delved deeper into their culture of calling out sexual harassment and
protecting their workers:
“A lot of [us] are girls that work there have been the helped in the family, as queer
women are often expected to. We’re strong women who have supported our mothers,
independent, and saw the kinds of shit they went through. Now being in a situation where
you are sexually harassed, no way…we’re here to break free of that.”

In another interview Melissa confirmed the solidarity in her all-female dispensary: “These
guys come in, and start trying to flirt. One dude was like, hey, you know I’m famous. Am I
supposed to be all up on your dick? What’s amazing is I could feel safe saying something like
that to him, because they have my back.”
The kinds of interpersonal protection and support across and within shops reflect the ways
that these relationships of interdependency could also become the ground to challenge the kinds
of exploitation that arose when compassion, cannabis and (peri)-capitalism came together. Black,
indigenous, Latinx and API, most especially queer and transgender, women shared experiences
of having to provide emotional and financial support for their kin through economic precarity
and gendered violence. Such knowledge, according to Mariana and Melissa, fueled a desire to
speak out against non-consensual sexualization in these worksites that had become sources of
economic and social survival – even when it risked their livelihoods. Where relational work for
Mears (2015) is a recipe for transgressing the boundaries that workers try to set up, here the
solidarities among workers, to other marginalized communities and to a broader project became
means to erect more queer (i.e., autonomous, self-determined) boundaries and break-walls.
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The affinity and relationships included young men stepping up to challenge their own cis-
gender-folk, in less of a male-on-the-white horse kind of way but integrated into everyday labor
processes. Ayanna, a late-20s Black Atlanta transplant to Central LA, found herself an
unexpected cannabis patient to manage crippling anxiety, and in even more surprise to herself,
working for many years at a Venice-area dispensary. She shared. “In marijuana, as a female you
get a lot of that: a dude who end up being creepy to the females, making them feel
uncomfortable.” Her voice is animated, her frustration clear. But, it wasn’t tolerated: “Other guys
[who were co-workers] would notice and would then be like,” and she gestured her arms, waving
in an invisible creep, “I am gonna help you.” If the abuser did not get the picture, then “we refuse
service. We ban them. You just...it’s a lot.”
“One dude was the worst. Even harassed the female customers. If someone was wearing a
skirt or dress, he would, like, look over the counter.” She hesitated asking for her help, even from
the other male workers. “I didn’t know at first, I didn’t want to say, don’t want to help this guy. I
mean, he spent 60 every single day. But he was such a fucking creep.” But she didn’t have to
ask; managers ultimately intervened, and after several conversations, “he ended up getting
banned,” despite the amount he spent.
Like in Mariana’s shop, owner-operators and managers at times participated with budtenders
and other front-line staff in a web of support and mutuality. Hierarchies in the shops were quite
diverse, and included more direct lines between management and staff, front-line workers as
managers and leads, or a fully collective leadership structure in some. Profit-sharing was a
common practice in some, and there was, at the least, more frequent interaction with managers.
Across many shops, the lack of ability to turn to state power opened the door for workers to
protect each other, more often than not, and to also step in for their patients. Gina, another
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budtender shared how her shop, because of their internal practices, many shops could become the
kind of safe space that transgender and unhoused patients actually felt comfortable entering and
being treated humanely, something that was far from common even in other businesses in the
same neighborhood: “We wanted to make sure you would feel safe walking in the
dispensary…For some, it was about positive reinforcement – you don’t want to get your
discounts revoked [by engaging in transphobia, or harassing another customer].” Front-line
workers harnessed fugitivity to protect each other and challenge the kinds of violence that
intimate labor has often been suffused with under global neoliberalism. Harm-multiplying
policing was not an option, and it was often not just “the customer knows best”; instead, it was
much more about a dialogue, an engagement and a relationship, prefiguring both abolitionist
praxis and collective labor action.
Taking on the Boss, or the Limits of Compassion
An expanding breadth of dispensary owners increased the chance for exploitation, and the
dissonances in some places pushed workers to not only stand up to patients, but to their
management and bosses as well. When talk of compassion or a neon green cross above the door
did not match up with practice, workers found ways to organize and take action without having
to turn to state violence. After a first experience with the internship fraud, Adriana eventually
settled into a shop with about three other girls, each of whom I interviewed, in the heart of
downtown LA. The work at Green Room 1 was grueling, but at least she was getting paid better
that her phantom “internship.” Much like at the other shop, a relationship with the other
budtenders got her in the door: “The girls got me hired because they needed to get away. The
girls got me hired coz they were like, I need time for myself: 14 hour days, 10 to midnight, that’s
a full day.” She did not mind when within the first weeks of working she was “making 420 a
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week” – cut to laughter – for three days of work a week, giving her time for school. She was
bouncing between apartments in South Central and her home-neighborhood of Boyle Heights,
and rent was always due, always getting higher and always in the calculation.
The dissonances quickly caught up, especially as the volume of product and work increased.
Breaks were non-existent, and she had to sneak meals when customers slowed up. The managers,
though, did not seem as pressed or consumed by work.
“They would go on their smoke break. They would leave the main girls there, and be
like: Oh, I gotta run. Meanwhile, I have to buzz the next person, I have to do their
paperwork. It would be midnight and I would go lock the door, and the manager would be
like clean here, clean this and I’m like its already midnight and he would be like, damn. Yes,
10 dollars an hour and good tips, but you would be dead by the end of the day – running the
shop on your own, having to deal with people.”

As time went by it “got tougher, and the managers started being more controlling, of your
schedule.” She summed the political economy of it up in direct fashion: “You are their
employee, you are their slave for that whole time, you gave yourself up.” A wage in exchange
for autonomy, not just alienation.
Management was all related - two brothers, and one cousin who rotated between a few shops
in the network. (This was a common practice, based in part on trust, and many people found jobs
in the industry through kin ties in general.) Across all of them, behavior was erratic, and they
protected each other. “The owner would say I want to take you to the back and crack your skull.
I want to see your blood bleeding all over the floor. And I want to stick 3 blunts in your ear.” I
was at a loss for words, as we sat in a bustling Boyle Heights café. That dissonance in that
moment alone, the bright walls, the horchata lattes, and the sharing of abject violence and
perhaps even his schizophrenia was glaring. Cannabis capitalism can get very dark, very fast.
Another manager (a brother, or cousin, she had lost track) was “drunk all the time.” The
owner-operator, when he would come by, would just spend most of the time, drinking (and of
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course smoking) with his family. He would look up only to ask the all-female budtenders to do
something. “He’s playing PS3, and then he’s like he like, if no one is here right now – you
should be rolling joints, you should be grinding something.”
The arrogance or disinterest, according to Adriana, came from the fact that the owners must
have thought that their capital – the fact “they are the ones with the money” – was enough. At
her breaking point, Adriana disappeared one day, fearful of the “dark, evil thoughts” of the
owner and his unpredictability. The other workers called to check in on her, and a few months
later, and “running out of money,” she called her boss and asked for a job back. It turned out the
family was opening a new dispensary downtown, Green Room 2, and it would be just her there
to help get set up. The pay was less, though, a punishment by the owner. “He [acted like] he was
giving me a second chance, but since I wasn’t getting any other job I was like, I’ll just do it for
now.”
Adriana had heard the owner had gone in for brain surgery at the time, which she thought
might deal with the instability and the violence. New budtenders were hired for the shop, and this
time around, the owner-operator gave her a more flexible schedule to go to school and participate
in theater, where she was aiming for a career. Relations of mutual support also helped keep her
showing up. Patients would often see her struggling to take a lunch and would bring her food;
more ongoing relationships were built; she had a strong friendship with almost all the young
women who came to work at this new shop over time, evident in what turned out to be a four
hour second group interview with them. They supported each other with their goals, encouraged
each other to pursue school and to learn more about the plant they were selling.
But that did not stop erratic or abusive behavior, especially as new budtenders were hired:
“He’d call us all in, even if we were out at home, and be like, [some product] was
missing and we need to have a meeting! He made us all come in, even though I was tired
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from school and work and wasn’t at all wanting to be there, I don’t have time…Very
unfortunately – he thought that he held all the power.
[….]
Or he would count 2300 bucks, and then it would say 2200 and he would be like, ‘I’m
off, and I am gonna get my money back so you all decide how you want to do it. And I
would like, ‘No way, I did my whole job. I am the one making sure that all the money goes
in and things are set up.’ After the long day of 11 hours, you are gonna tell me that I did
this? Now I gotta pay 15 bucks off my paycheck and dunno why the fuck its off. I put it all
in – and I don’t know.
And I’d be like. ‘Are you sure that you didn’t take it out, pay someone off buy
something from a vendor that came in. He would snap back, ‘I write everything I take out of
the register.’ Which actually wasn’t true. But I’d be like. ‘Ok, I really dunno what to say.’”

While managing the older man’s fragile ego and lack of business practices, she and her
coworkers managed to push back together and stave off his ever present threat of, “Well I’m
collecting my money!” But she saw trouble coming:
“One day, it got to another big argument, when called us all in, building up to that point
where I felt he is gonna start collecting our money. And I had already put it my head, ‘If he
does that, I quit, so what? I’m still not gonna get paid; I’m doing all this work and if he
starts cutting in it then there’s nothing left here.’”

And indeed, the big argument came, and she, and three other budtenders fought back against
the attempt to dock their pay for something they knew they had no part in. Adriana walked out,
and was joined by several others. This was the last and final walk out for her. The two other girls
would go back, but none of them got their pay docked. The strength of the relationships on the
shop floor that empowered them to push back, to prevent a person with all kinds of positional
power and a penchant for violence from escalating on his threats. The visible flows of cash made
it clear someone was also benefitting, and that mutuality and care was profitable for some but not
all. There was no way that a business like that could not take a small loss here and there, and
neither Adriana nor her coworkers were going to go further in exploiting herself or seeing her
coworkers screwed out of something like $15 – two hours of pay.
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At some point, the desire to provide care and for cash felt far enough from what was actually
in practice that it inspired turning relationships of solidarity into impetus for collective action. I
was a far from perfect or politically rich victory. And it was clear that the context of precarity
was always looming; Adriana kept having to return to working in the shops when few options
presented themselves, especially as she bounced between what were once affordable LA
neighborhoods on the gentrification train (literally: seeing prices rise following the new local
Metro lines).
Stephanie, one of the more experienced of the budtenders that Adriana worked with, also
eventually headed on to the next shop. She settled on one that felt it paid a little better and where
she could make some “side money” trimming cannabis. Sticking around often came with the
hope of finding that better paying job – or the kinds of shops that CP, CA and Ayanna’s shop
embodied – of both good relationships and better labor conditions. These three shops were
among the first to unionize, following the 2013 passage of Proposition D; the increasing union
presence across dozens of stores (30-some by the eve of legalization) was also opening up more
options for a more stable environment that had, at the least, mediation for issues on the floor and
set pay. Part of what made unionization votes at the time so easy is that the organizers
consistently spoke of these ties between patients and people, and the need to protect them even
making it central to their public policy campaigns (described in Chapter 3).
Sticking it out was also was predicated on the promise of holding the knowledge and
relationships that had helped build the soon-to-be- legal market.
Stephanie: I mean you have a pretty like long experience, how long do you think most girls
last in this job?

Stephanie: Usually they stay a long time, especially if they’re like moving up and
stuff, they tend to stay there. They kept pissing me off like I have friends that are 26 and
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are still there just because they’re comfortable. It’s just because they’re comfortable in
there.

Me: Why do you think they’re not trying to get out?

Stephanie: They like the pay, yeah, they like the people. They definitely see
themselves in the industry and they think like once it’s 2018 and it becomes legal, it’s
going to be a lot better for them you know?

Interviewer: What do you think?

Interviewee: There’s other stuff you can do, a lot of other stuff. It’s not the only option.
But yeah, there is a lot of money involved especially when it turns 2018 recreationally
there’s going to be lots of more money. But you gotta make it there.

Comfortable: it’s not something that one hears too often about the precarious global
economy, and part of the contentment was outlined above, a relational web that provided some
solidarity and relief from the naked violence of life in an increasingly expensive and unequal
city. It’s not something one can fault her friends for, in this economy. Stephanie worried, though,
that comfort meant complacency and in some cases, exploitation. The promises of better money
and tapping into the expanding value might never come. Yes, you had good relationships, you
were helping people meanwhile, you also got access to weed and to echo Leo and Melinna’s
words, “some mental stability.” Yes, you could accrue deeper aesthetic and humanistic value.
But where and how the relationships among workers, managers, owner-operators and patients
were turned on their head was unpredictable. Given the right connections or chance, you could
leave an abusive situation for a respectful boss or team. You could land a union gig. You could
even thrive. You could weight all these options all day long: meanwhile, rent had to be paid, tips
had to be made, life had to be lived.
Where Worker Power Lies
The relationships of fugitive care among workers were not just mobilized against
management; they could also be turned to confront the continual intervention of the plantation-
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police state. CP, for all of the collective’s adherence to every rule in the regulation-book
(detailed in Chapter 5), it’s detailed intake process and medical, found itself the subject of police
raids like so many other dispensaries. Melinna remembers the look of horror in the face of a
young, new patient, who decided to come to a dispensary for the first time. After she and her
coworkers were released more than 6 hours later, they noticed that their general manager,
Andrew was still in custody. So they gathered around the van where Andrew was being held
demanding his release. “No one wanted to leave unless Alex was free,” Melinna explained.
“They had him sitting in the truck, taunting us, ‘how many of you guys are high?’ She had
managed to sneak one phone call during the raid to her sister to make sure her son was picked up
from school, but otherwise, communication was cut off for the duration of the raid and standoff,
even though no one was being charged.
“They would say snarky things, we come back with some education,” Angelica
explained. Eventually after holding their ground in the parking lot, the workers circling the van
for several hours, Alex was released. The rest of the shop did not escape so well. “They come in,
tearing down the fucking video cam, drill bits this big and thick and drill thru the safe,” Leo
described. “It’s an attack on our community, our culture. Imagine everything you worked to
create, this medicine all being put in garbage bags, all compromised.”
But the dispensary still re-opened, drawing upon their close ties to producers to get
product on loan, committed to ensuring that their patients still had access. “We sent a message:
You are not going to shut us down – we are going to continue to help people. We were robbed.”
Melinna explained that she would do it all over again if she needed:
“Being a parent, knowing there is so many kids out there we can help, that’s what keeps
me going. All this makes being ok with being raided, having handcuffs on, watching my
coworkers, everyone in one room, with guns to our faces, all that stuff. It’s a lot stronger feeling
to want to help that being afraid to deal with that bullshit.”
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In that moment – like those that were helping create a swath of unionized shops among the
dispensaries, a fugitive relationality was integral to exercising power, to confronting the blunt
face of the drug war-carceral state. (In fact, through the union workers organized know your-
rights training for each other on how to survive raids, and a phone tree to warn each other when
raids were occurring and to reach out for legal and direction support. “It’s no different than
undocumented workers,” one seasoned labor organizer in cannabis explained.”
Efforts to examine the relational nature of work is often, though, just how much self-
exploitation and fooling-yourself one can do as you consent to economic subjugation (Burawoy
1979; Mears 2015; Sallaz 2009; Sherman 2007). Yes, it’s critical to recognize the ways in which
capitalist power over labor exists in a multiplicity of ways, and how this is fundamental to the
accumulation of value. The more that cannabis workers gave, the more they stretched their
imagination, they more it allowed the economy to grow. And the more it embedded an ethos of
medical care into the market’s evolution. Labor, in other words, was setting and walking the path
of the market in many ways that could not be easily wiped out with legalization.
While gaining relatively better wages alongside their care, many cannabis retail workers
were also creating value in other ways, in terms of the relationships they built and the
experiences of collective joy and affirmations of healing. A commitment to care, according to
many budtenders, become unavoidable in the context of multiple social crises for which they
become the front line – both named and unnamed traumas. The personal investment reflected,
not just an abstract compassion, but a sense of mutual aid and solidarity with others experiencing
similar violence in a moment where skyrocketing inequality hung (and hangs) over Los Angeles
like smog once did (and, usually, in areas where the air quality is still pretty terrible). A sense of
exclusion forged new ways to create inclusion. It informed a way to make sense of the world
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(and again, an epistemology filtered through cannabis), to ask questions about why and how this
plant became criminalized and what connected the people lined up in their waiting rooms.
From this perspective, these relationships of care forged in a context of “deviant” life
actually became a fundamental point for workers to organize through to protect themselves and
each other, including against police. They understood their position in the workplace already vis-
à-vis a broader set of social and economic relationships with other marginalized people. Starting
with the relationships on the shop floor offers a different take on worker power, oftentimes,
thought of by sociologists and geographers from a macro-structural level, from big sweeping
historical shifts
19
or from what happens outside of the workplace (like the jump to social
movement unionism). Cannabis helps re-center an understanding of labor power on the actual
workplace as a site of relations and emergent tactics and strategies that can lead to gains. The
work-site doesn’t just have to be the place that workers convince themselves into consent; they
can also be relational spaces where people can, in fact, come together in diverse ways and for
broader political ends.
The worksite was thus a site where the contradictions of growth crystallized. The deeper sets
of relationships fueled a new and crucial role from dispensaries, an expanding set of customers
and profit, while engendering a set of mutuality that would also clash with commodified market
expansion. Relationships became power to take care of each other and confront their bosses and
patients who pushed against their values in numerous ways; contradictions became more distinct
and politics sharpened as people built across lines of difference, helping build a union effort.

19
The historical sociologist Beverly Silver exposed how, throughout more than 150 years of labor history, the actual
workplace relations were one of several key sources of power that workers drew upon during key moments when
conditions changed (Silver 2003). Based partially on the work of Erik Ollin Wright, what she calls “workplace
bargaining power” is a source of organizing power and a way to shut down whole economies because of the
“strategic location of a group of workers with a key industrial area” (Silver 2003:13; Wright 2000)
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Exploring the relations of power and fugitive care both makes clear why and how cannabis - in a
context of Los Angeles’ racialized and gendered capitalist landscape - might have attracted not
just precarious workers, but helped bring in a wide network of patients and with it, wealth. It also
explains why workers might not simply hand over the keys to the world they built to a new set of
corporate actors and investors who began buzzing at the edges of the market as cash flowed and
legalization loomed.

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Chapter 4: Everyday Experiments in Endocannabinoids

Plants with the power to revise our thoughts and perceptions, to provoke metaphor and
wonder, challenge our engrained Judeo-Christian belief that our conscious waking selves
somehow stand apart from nature, have achieved that kind of transcendence. Just what
happens to this flattering self-portrait, if we discover that transcendence itself owes to
molecules that flow through our brains, and at the same time, through the plants in the
garden, if some of the brightest fruits of human culture are, in fact, rooted deeply in the earth
with the plants and fungi? Is nature then, as Sartre claimed, mute, or might it mean that spirit
is, in fact, part of nature, or there may be no older idea in the world?

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (2001).

The Children’s Care office stood at the topic of a boxy, mid-rise building, the kind that dot
the height-restricted skyline of west side of Los Angeles. I waited for Cindy, the canna-
company’s CEO, as cheery secretaries and staff wrapped Christmas presents that were to go to
the patients of the canna-business. The space was open-wide and postmodern, interrupted by
full-glass front offices and occasional desks. There was an abundance of platinum hair, bright
smiles, business casual dress. If the cannabis dispensary resembles a community clinic, this is
somewhere between a public relations office and a teeth whitening center. Cindy, a blonde white
woman in her late 40s with bright red lipstick, introduced me as “a writer with a magazine.” I
understand her mistake: We had just met one of the many ongoing events run by ad-hoc
advocacy groups and business associations sprouting up to talk about the legalization process,
and there were many business cards being passed around at these quasi-mixers. With the ongoing
process of writing Los Angeles’ legalization regulations (to respond to the just-passed
Proposition 64), the forums were almost a weekly occurrence in one part of the city or another in
2018. As we made rounds, we met marketing, administrative staff, and tucked away in a corner,
workers focused on producing and packaging extracts,
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Cindy took me to her office, and points to a dizzying, bright wall of photo, all with the
pictures of smiling children. She pointed to one, a young man in his teens: “Our first patient,
stage four, end of life cancer. The kid was given zero chance of living by western medicine. I got
him started, in under 30 days he was cancer free.” The heart of her work, though, is Cindy’s
daughter, Grace, who is in photographs on the same wall, showing her from infancy on to her
current toddler age. Her beaming grin, showcasing new teeth, and a slight squint in her eye,
Grace was the center of this space and of the story of the founder of Children’s Care. Cindy had
sought a remedy for her infant daughter’s rare brain tumor. A desperate search on social media
sites and message boards for a solution introduced her (via Facebook) to postings by Ricki Lake
suggesting, to Cindy’s surprise, cannabis. While she had heard this first from colleagues of her
husband, she assumed they were “stoned out of their minds;” cannabis “was the one thing I
completely dismissed, I thought it was garbage.” But having followed Lake’s advice regarding
natural birth prior, she thought it might be worth a shot.
“I knew we had to do something more than pump my eight and half month old’s body full of
toxic chemo with nothing to support her body, or her immune system, or her just as a human,”
she told me in her office. She was especially concerned with what felt like the stagnation in
chemotherapy, which for “almost 30 years” had remained relatively unchanged. Surrounded by
the research that Lake and others provided, and unable to find “anything negative,” she
connected with one of the few (public) cannabis oil manufacturers in California. Since she began
a regimen of the oil, Grace has been experiencing “miracle after miracle,” seeing both the tumor
diminish and related impairments far lower than anything anticipated. The results (and the
struggle to find an adequate, safe manufacture) motivated Cindy to create a cannabis collective
that would provide this medicine to other “parents, moms, dads, caretakers.” Part of the decision
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was the fear that the oil manufacturer might one close up, due to shifting regulations and the
instability of the criminalized market.
There was, in Cindy’s estimation, “a huge vacuum in the market for quality medicine, that
was lab tested and allowed for guided dosing, from professionals that knew what they were
talking about on both the western medicine side and the cannabinoid side.” Cannabis, in the
landscape Cindy articulated, stood on the other side of an established regimen of “western
medicine” tied to pharmaceutical corporations. She explained more fully that when it came to
mainstream US medical practice, each type of cancer had a fairly straightforward dosage of
chemotherapy based on body weight. This neglected the fact that cancer mutations appeared
differently according to each “genetic profile,” and required tailored responses. Meanwhile, pain
to mitigate the violence of chemotherapy would require opioids, “being deled out to children.”
Her words raised the specter of opioid crisis live in the news that year, one that, as many critics
have argued, gained particular attention only because of the way it was affecting white
populations (Hansen 2017; Netherland and Hansen 2017; Schlosser 2019)
On the flipside, cannabinoid medicine, as she called it, represented a “personalized medicine
approach,” in her estimation, that would “treat our bodies on a genetic level.” Dispensing
cannabis to Grace meant “watching her body and understanding what the disease was doing and
what the cannabis was doing [and] continually adjusted her dosage.” It also meant being
comfortable with her child possibly being “high,” and in general, breaking down “the stigma”
associated with psychoactive elements in cannabis. Critical to her learning, was of course,
budtenders: “I did not except so many workers so many to be so educated, excited – they are
citing research, telling me about patient studies, sharing their work.”
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In this chapter, I share more about how, as Cindy explained, budtending and fugitive care in
fact was one part of an interconnected chain of knowledge regarding this medical-commodity,
centered on the cannabis plant. Focusing on the commodity relationship in cannabis, as noted in
Chapter 2, requires understanding it’s production as criminal, it’s entanglement with
criminalization, racial and gender/sexuality formations, and violence. But fugitive status opened
a way for a rather incomplete commodification to build chains of exchange, innovation, and
knowledge-sharing. Front-line dispensary, cultivation and other workers in extraction and
manufacturing took on a role as grassroots knowledge-producers tapping deeper into – and
reshaping - the plant’s medicinal and experiential (including “recreational”) applications and
properties. Collectively, this science was as open source as it gets - not registered in mainstream
medical journals or pharmacological studies, and in fact shunned by US institutional medicine.
Experimenting with the plant was crucial to continually expanding the production of value
in cannabis and helped foster ingenuities like hydroponics, sustainable watering systems that
could be applied beyond the industry. Much in this chapter affirms findings of economic
geography on regional growth – how scaled up knowledge, shared production, and other factors
helped Los Angeles become a center of new cultivation and health knowledge. Indeed, the plant
was, in many ways, expanding its economic value out of dense networks of innovation, but not
by any straightforward process of capitalist alienation. In fact, many participants embraced a care
not just for others but for the plant, and lifted up cannabis’ own agency and complexity. They
found other value within this – sociality, an engagement with nature, and other benefits that
could not be whittled into profit alone. And none of these many forms of value and associated
alternative forms of explanation would be possible without distinct properties of the plant,
including its endocannabinoid system, and its own fierce determination to reproduce and adapt.
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Bringing in a political-ecological lens, and in particular, the concept of socio-natures helps
recognize the desires and hopes for more expansive views of nature-as-product, that nuance
commodification and move towards a more holistic kin-making with the plant (Peluso 2012;
Robbins, Hintz, and Moore 2014). Such an analysis requires an explicit engagement with the
ways race and gender are produced and remapped through socio-natural processes like
commodification. The motivation of and processes by which budtenders, cultivators and
manufactures to experiment so were structured by both regimes of premature death that affect
communities of color and queer lives. In many ways, this was an explicitly fugitive science.
Participants’ ingenuities reflect both desires for self-determination, reverberating with broader
histories of Black ecological anchored in the geographies of the plot. Indeed, cultivators and
budtenders also traced its development to broader streams of resistance and survival by enslaved
people and to indigenous alternatives, cementing it as a counter to the plantation and settler-
colonial violence. In the present, actors were constantly seeking to undo stigmas from all kinds
of institutionally-produced moral, racialized panics regarding the plant.
Fugitivity – including in this engagement with nature - is not to be romanticized of course;
the choice of eluding or escaping powerful institutions bears great risk. This included losing
whole quantities of flower to robbery, violence, and police expropriation. While Cindy was
currently “operating without a lot of worry,” the same could not be said of many across the
industry, and she “tried to lend [her] voice as often as I can to lend legitimacy to this as a
medicine.” Meanwhile, other budtenders, cultivators and even manufacturers, most often Black,
Latinx, API and indigenous. were still being jailed in regular raids.
The criminalization of cannabis created the unintended ability to keep such practices
alternative and far from being subsumed under propertied biotech and pharmaceutical regimes,
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but also ended up creating instabilities in monocultural production that affected the plants’ own
survival. In the latter case, the need to both ramp up production with market expansion and
respond to criminalization was continually altering production, leading to plant now more prone
than ever to mold, pests and pesticide use (which actually could be toxic to humans – contrary to
Cindy’s assertion about death). Attempts to reconcile the different narratives during legalization,
too, proved complex, and many were willing to take short cuts to make a more marketable
product like CBD.
These ever-changing dialectics, with the plant shaping social relations and social relations
shaping the plant, help elucidate how cannabis shifts as socio-natural commodity, driving in part
the market’s growth and its path as a medical product. Increasingly, new “shocks” like
legalizations began to shift these circuits, opening the door for more narrow commodification
while breeding new political counter-projects to retain the non-monetary values tied to the plant.
Making Nature Money, and Nature Making Money
This chapter furthers our understanding of the ways in which cannabis economies expanded
and the relationship to the ways value was and is imagined, produced and contested in the
growing cannabis economy. Grasping how this occurs in the commodity relationship calls for
perspectives from feminist political ecological, actor-network, Black radical and other scholars
have developed in relationship with the “more than human,” and the nature of contemporary
commodification processes. Much like with labor, a more straightforward political-economic
lens would tell us that cannabis, to become a market, must become abstracted (or removed or
dissociated) from more natural or intrinsic relationships. Marx’ diagnosis of the alienation of
labor is inextricable from the ways in which the production of the commodity is erased and its
valuation turned against workers (1867). In Marxist analysis of the commodity fetish, the objects
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of labor ultimately come to control human lives, and societies are re-organized in pursuit of these
abstracted objects, that drive the accumulation of capitalist value, to little benefit to those who
produce them thanks to the wage and capital relationship.
20
The quintessential example of this
today: an iPhone.
For Marx, living objects like plants, or what fall under the category of nature, fall in a bit of
a different realm, where they are not so much fetishized as subjugated to the interests of capital,
leading him to say that capitalism had enabled a fundamental “rift” in among human and social
and ecological relations, a loss of a “metabolic” interconnection leading to such phenomena as
soil depletion (Foster 1999, 2013; Lukács 1972; Marx 1867). Scholars have sought to
accordingly document the expansion of such rifts, including in relation to current crises like
climate change and oceanic overfishing (Foster, Clark, and York 2011). Clearly, Marx is not the
only one to have captured such a cleavage, a long-time subject in numerous scholarly and social
traditions, including indigenous, Buddhist, and Black diasporic thought, and a whole body of
(feminist) political ecology
21
(Heynen 2018).
Through a lens attuned to global racial capitalism, turning cannabis into a criminalized
commodity starting in the early 20
th
Century meant elite and state institutions devaluing the
plant’s medicinal purposes: showing it as alien to modern capitalism and counter to health, a
practice originating in colonial Algeria and post-revolutionary Mexico (Campos 2012; Guba
2020). Active political projects tied to maintaining a white-dominant racial and gendered order
sought to show that, while cannabis could easily be abstracted to a money maker, it also

20
In succinct form, Marx emphasizes in Capital, Volume 1, “As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his
own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand” (Marx 1867:681)
21
Political ecology can be summed up by as studying “the uneven distribution of access to and control over
reosurces on the basis of class and ethnicity,” and feminist political ecology more broadly considers gender but also
the ways in which different meanings and practices regarding “nature” are given or deprived of power and
legitimacy (Escobar 1998; Heynen 2018; Peet and Watts 2002; Rocheleau 2008).
126
threatened value accumulation by making workers lazier or threatening the well-being of
children (i.e. social reproduction), described in Chapter 2 (Marez 2004). While these racialized
narratives may have helped bury the medicinal qualities of cannabis, the ways the state and
market actors pushed for illicit status played a critical role in eliciting monetary value, regardless
of its medical, recreational or other uses (Polson 2013).
Yet, the medicinal uses of cannabis persisted, especially outside of the use, in the Caribbean
in part through Rastafari practice, in parts of Latin America as tinctures, resurging in the US in
the context of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1990s. In Los Angeles, As economic geographers have
demonstrated, actors generated solid circuits and networks for knowledge are a critical “untraded
interdependency” vital to an industry’s regional expansion, and in this case, the solidifying
networks through the dispensary and expanding indoor cultivation, allowing for “territorializing”
information among farmers and patient-facing workers (Morgan 2007; Storper 1995). These
place-based networks of knowledge helped “create and sustain” certain forms of medical
knowledge especially, and thus direct the development of the industry on a re-emerging path as a
place of heath practice (cf. Henry and Pinch 2000:193).
A geographic perspective attuned to Black radical analysis takes us from abstract equations
converting labor-power and fetishized goods together into profit towards an analysis of ongoing
processes of everyday production and consumption. It was never enough to just call cannabis a
medicinal plant and thus expand the economy’s scope; that had to be hard-wired in through
everyday networks. Institutions like the dispensary and the indoor warehouses helped spatialize a
set of relationships and knowledge – very different from university halls, biomedical labs or
hospital clinics, and leading to quite a different variety of outcomes. This is particularly
important given the ways in which such grassroots spaces also did not have the kinds of barriers
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that mainstream institutions did, like needing access to certain degrees or wealth. In part, these
fugitive spaces kept cannabis categorized as illicit and out of the realm of biomedical industries,
where it would likely stop being viewed as a whole plant. Los Angeles was a unique and critical
location for these circuits of knowledge to thrive, not the least of which was the relationship to
LGBTQ movements on the ground that helped foment the dispensary model, and the Occupy-
style efforts to protect dispensaries. Labor unions were also critical to solidifying an institutional
role for dispensaries and the budtender as a health worker – including through its political
organizing. Queer and labor movements embracing alternative care and recognizing the body as
a political terrain played an active role in circulating fugitive knowledge. It’s important to note,
this medical nature was porous: the plant’s possibilities for enjoyment, escape, forgetting were
not erased either, and much effort went into exploring these through breeding techniques.
Yet in many ways the more that cannabis moved from being a fugitive, multi-dimensional
commodity to a legalized, traded and regulated object, the more its nature shifted. The indoor
geography began to echo plantation models and with it, bear destructive effects on the plant in
terms of increased exposure to mold, pesticides and infestation (not to mention lead to significant
environmental damage in water and electricity consumption).
Geographers Sarah Moore and Paul Robbins see possibilities to capture these contradictory
and complex processes by which natural commodities are constantly in flux and tied to broader
power relations through political ecology, a body of scholarship that has always attended to the
dynamic nature of, well, conceptions of nature and how these are rooted in material changes and
ideological and social shifts (2015; cf. Robbins et al. 2014). Political ecology does not rely on
simplifying dualisms that view particular “traditional” or localized practices as “resistance” to
capital-centered ideas, but rather as emanating from different forms of economic positioning and
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power. Nancy Peluso’s idea of “socio-natures” is particularly useful for recognizing human and
natural agency and tracing how ecological formations are “in constant motion, with many
shifting social, environmental and ideational relationships being constructed and broken apart”
(2012:81; Swyngedouw 2007). Peluso links Marx with conceptualizations from Antonio
Gramsci, Karl Polanyi, Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault and Latour (so we don’t have to!) to
help us see the capitalist (re)construction of nature as rooted in time and place, inextricable from
the actual material qualities of natural objects, and entangled in broader cultural and social
relations of power.
22

Working alongside Donna Haraway, and drawing from similar threads as Peluso, Anna
Tsing sheds further light on alternative ecological relationships without discarding their
entanglements in capitalism (Tsing 2005, 2015). In highlighting the ways in which non-monetary
“gift” relations persist along a given supply chain (in her case, certain highly-valued fungi),
Tsing suggests that capitalist value is actually extracted at times from everyday social relations:
“The discipline of labor and natural resources, which builds alienation and privatization into the
commodity, is never fully successful. Capitalism always requires non-capitalist social relations
to accomplish its goals” (2013:37).
23
What does this mean? A natural object will never have
make profit just because capitalism says it’s so; we must look to the ways these objects also have
value outside of the direct for money. In cannabis, “gift” kind of exchanges (i.e. free and super-
discounted medicine) happened through Cannabis Buyer Clubs and later dispensaries built ties

22
For example, Peluso is influenced by Karl Polanyi’s understanding of the double movement, and how, as
capitalism has progressed historically, social mechanisms and movements have risen up to challenge teh
subsumption of social reality under market forces – most especially the commodification of land, labor and other
key elements (Block 2003; Polanyi 1944). These societal tensions, she notes, inform the dynamics of socio-natures
and their politics (Peluso 2012).
23
To some extent, Tsing parallels the analysis by scholars influenced by Karl Polanyi that emphasize the historical,
continual dialectic between commodification and the impulse to retain the commons, the continual dialectic that is
produced by capitalists’ impulse to make everything profit-driven versus a more human-needs centered approach.
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that were essential to expanding this economy and giving it further value. (Cannabis is also a
shared plant, often – a joint is often consumed in relationship with others, and people are rarely
expected to chip in to partake, unlike maybe a shared meal at a restaurant.) Both Tsing and
Peluso and Tsing offer an opportunity to understand both big-pictural structural shifts and
power, but also everyday non-commodified social exchanges, that shape human’s relationship to
natural products (Peluso 2012; Tsing 2005).
In what follows, I think through the production of cannabis as a fugitive socio-natural
commodity, in a way that understands these processes as being worked out in everyday exchange
relationships, and as a response to a certain juncture in racial capitalist plantation geographies.
Doing so helps push the related political-ecological literature to more directly center race and
gender as co-constituted vis-à-vis nature and as fundamentally shaping how human labor and
nature are transformed into value in the context of racial capitalism.
24
I foreground how
racialized and gendered inequality both informed why and how participants experimented with
the plant and its knowledge, as well as how their work was in constant dialectic with racialized
state and institutional medicinal narratives about cannabis (and at times, Black and brown
parents) as a danger to youth and society. A Black radical perspective on socio-natures gives a
sense of how monetary, capitalist value is produced in relation to plantation geographies and
fugitive science tied to alternative explanations of the world (both in direct relationship to
medicine and in refusing certain class, race and gender divisions.)
Such an approach brings to light the multiple forms of value created in these relationships
with nature, even alongside profit-extraction. Being immersed in cannabis’ fugitive science

24
This builds upon initial work by scholars such as Kosek (2006) and Moore et al. (2003) have helped push
geography and political ecology in this direction, but that require far deeper analysis, particularly from a perspective
of labor and racial capitalism.
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offered participants a range of aesthetic, experiential and social value beyond the money they
made, as so many also partook in the plant, used it to care for others and built a sense of pride
and belonging in this complex community. It also opens the door – which I will briefly touch
upon - to further exploration of the more-than-human as active agents in such processes, who
offered their own biological ways of being that helped direct history.
Not-So-Clinical Experiments in Cannabis
Before she started working at the CP dispensary, Melinna struggled to care for her son with
Tourette’s Syndrome, whose level of seizures by middle school age were debilitating and life-
threatening. While doing the best to “deal with it,” the options were running out and her son was
suffering. She was unwilling to utilize pharmaceuticals, fearing the effects on her son. “I denied
the doctor, when he told me, ‘Here we can give him this prescription.’ And I was like, no we can
do other things, I can change his diet, I can do other things to try and fix this.” Melinna’s distrust
was grounded in a real lack of evidence regarding the effectiveness of pharmaceuticals on
Tourette’s: If consulting the CDC, there are no actual medicines approved by the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) for treating tics; most are utilized for ancillary conditions, including
ADHD, and include the widely used and controversial drug, Ritalin (Center for Disease Control
2020).
Melinna knew of the side effects and the fact that the tics themselves would not even be
addressed, and she asked to start on alternative regimes, like diet change, first. She shared, “The
neurologist was really pissed off, why don’t you give him the prescription?” When she re-
asserted her standpoint he told her, “Well don’t come back to me if you aren’t going to try this
prescription.” Her answer: “Fuck you, I am not coming back to you because you are trying to
push this pill down my son’s throat.”
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With few options left, she considered cannabis but also could not find enough research to
justify the decision. Given the anti-cannabis federal funding bias and anti-drug public health
campaigns, most studies of cannabis were cautionary tales of cannabis and brain development,
and she could not figure out what the real effects would be on her son. “After being unsure for so
long, I had a mom come in and say cannabis was amazing to treat Tourette’s,” she explained.
The mother shared the success she had in reducing tics and seizures, and kept coming back to the
shop; after much dialogue, Melinna told herself, “Fuck, just do it. Just do it.”
Her first instinct was to eliminate THC altogether, thinking, “I don’t want to get him high,
he’s small,” fearful of research showing an effect on adolescent brain development. But she also
knew from the hundreds of patients she was seeing that isolated CBD would not have the same
effects – something Tracy’s research with even the youngest children confirmed. At first,
Melinna didn’t tell her son what he was taking – a tincture created that had an equal balance of
CBD and THC, what’s often called a “1:1.” Most of her dosing knowledge came from the adults
she served as a cannabis consultant, and she adjusted first to one-third the standard dosage to
then one-half, a daily process of trial (and error).
Cindy had described a similar process – moving from an equal THC and CBD dosage, and
then increasing the THC ratio with THC-A extract for certain growth spurts to halt the blood
flow that aided in the reproduction of the tumor. For Cindy, across three years, tumor growth
was limited, sight was returning, and the “growth spurts” lessened. Melinna, too, eventually
found the right dosage for her son. She trained her son (as he entered into high school) on how to
administer the oil; while at first “he knew it was helping him, but he didn’t know what it was,”
she later told him what was in the oil. When his tics would flare up, he would self-medicate: “On
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the days where his nervous system was flaring, or his tics were overwhelming, he knew to ask,
and of course, I made sure he had access to it.”
In a context where institutional knowledge was limited to a prohibitionary approach,
especially regarding children, everyday experiments were the only – and the riskiest – means to
engage in this emerging area of pediatric care. Melinna and Cindy did so as people with a foot in
the industry economically, and the blurred lines among workers and patients allowed a flow of
back-and-forth knowledge, through workers constantly absorbing, charting and advancing new
medical practices and applications.
To Cindy, her experiments and those by the growing Children’s Care patient base bore little
risks to the patient themselves, counter to what she saw in synthetic pharmaceuticals. She
explained:
“Different from pharmaceuticals, we don’t need clinical trials in the same way, we don’t
have to calculate: What point does the patient succumb to death, what point is it too toxic?
Cannabis can’t kill anyone, it just had to be understood.”

While this is a bit of an oversimplification of the nature of clinical trials, the more salient
point is that Cindy saw this as a very different commodity relation than in mainstream medicine,
one that involved more of a relationship with a plant than with toxic objects. Eventually, Cindy
was able to convince researchers to conduct trials on the effectiveness of cannabis with several
private hospitals, but in an almost fugitive manner. More able to sequester funding from federal
scrutiny, and finding a particularly open Institutional Review Board (IRB), they were at the time
running small experiments on post-surgery pain from oncology and plastic surgery for children.
As Melinna and Cindy made clear, experimenting with cannabis bore significant legal,
emotional and social penalties - not just monetary. This care would now have to be a fugitive
relationship shielded from a wide number of institutions, including most accredited doctors. As a
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parent, Melinna was liable for arrest and separation from her child by the punitive child welfare
system. Eventually, she explained to her son what he was taking, and he too took up a disdain of
pharmaceutical solutions. “Sometimes I feel bad, because I tell him, about pills, they are made
here, and like this, and we are guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical companies and all this stuff,”
she shared. “And he says, I feel bad seeing [my friend] in the office asking for medicine.” He
wanted to speak up, to suggest that his friends who kept having flare ups try cannabis oil, but
Melinna had made rule number one absolute silence for his and her protection.
As parents, Melinna and Cindy had their experiments in care with cannabis particularly
threatened by the criminalization of cannabis. The fear of drug addiction and youth had been a
central theme in the war on drugs as early as the 1930s and to the present, in particular to
marijuana (Logli 1990; Provine 2008) .
25
Moral panics on parental use of drugs like cannabis in
the US had also become a central way to separate particularly Black, Latinx and indigenous
women from children, which Melinna raised as an ever-present threat (Hagan and Coleman
2001; Roberts 2011). Cindy woke up to this when her off-the-books grow after the first time it
was robbed. The fact that she could not report this to the police drove home the point that
cultivation might lead to arrest and separation; it also affected her economic strategies. She then
turned to an outside cultivator (likely a person of color), who had to bear the risk more directly.
Melinna, as a Latina, was much more acutely aware of mass incarceration, especially as she
knew neighbors arrested for cannabis sales and since her shop had been raided by the Los
Angeles Police Department several times. Fugitive experimentation fueling the expansive uses of

25
This war extended even to the womb, where there were frequent public debates during the council hearings in LA
on the regulation of legal cannabis regarding the status of pregnant women and the risks they created. One well-
funded anti-drug organization described a loosely-defined study they did calling different dispensaries, asking what
they would prescribe for pregnant women, and noting that some did offer different cannabis drugs. This was meant
to be an example of the dangers posed by budtenders to the unborn. No different than the imagined “crack” baby,
much of the ideas of the effect of cannabis on infant brains was based on a lack of existing scientific knowledge and
on subtly racialized images of women of color as unfit (Logli 1990, Logan 1999)
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the commodity was often mediated by a racialized and gendered policing regime that reached
into the household, that placed caregivers of color in precarious situations (cf. Roberts 2011). It
was also often constructed as a political act, in opposition to a regime of pharmaceutical
corporations that themselves were seen as profiting off and addicting children to “pills” or
damaging their bodies through radiation and other forms of “poison.”
While the debates and challenges of cannabis as medicine heightened when children were
the subject of debate (and deployed in political messaging), the constructed opposition between
“Big Pharma” and cannabis fugitive science went beyond youth. Alexis, a sometimes-cultivator,
had worked in the pharmaceutical industry herself and offered insight into this dichotomy, and
its politics. We met at a dark café that might as well be a bar in Hollywood; it smells of coffee
soak into carpet, cigarettes from another era, and air conditioning. She arrived in an intense
cocktail dress, her bright red hair down; it’s much a standard outfit I’ve seen her at during city
council, public forum and planning meetings alike. It’s not hard to imagine her working in a
corporate setting, that she, like Cindy, had somehow broken free into cannabis from.
“I had been made victim of the Big Pharma lifetime loyalty program, on multiple pills,” she
started off. “I had been working at [a major for-profit healthcare corporation], and every
promotion was leading to me being even more unhappy and using.” Something snapped, and she
realized that she was “working for addictions.” As she planned an exit, she started to consider
cannabis both as a means to break off her pharmaceutical habit. Ironically, they were tested
regularly for cannabis, and she had to choose between her job and this alternative medicine.
“Although I worked in health care, there wasn’t anything healthy about it,” she said flatly.
There is something almost LA-noir about her story; perhaps it is the jazz and the dim lighting, or
the fact that her first cannabis business opportunity came from a long-ago contact working in a
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post-production warehouse in Hollywood. That, and the fact that she shares about the struggle of
a “tight-lipped” industry where few things were “documented,” due to its policing, where she
had “to use [her] looks” to get information and connections.
Alexis pointed to corporations’ continual opposition defining medical marijuana as a
political project. Politically, pharmaceutical corporations would stand in the way of cannabis
legalization: “Until they figure other revenue streams, they have to use the political arena to
make sure that this doesn’t survive financially and quote-unquote respond to their positions.” Her
involvement in cannabis meant that many of her former corporate friends no longer talked to her,
and her own sister, a pharmaceutical rep, “won’t have anything to do with me.” It stung
personally as many people, in her eyes, “had no problem when I was hopped up on bills downed
with a bottle of wine or whiskey, but god forbid I have something that grows out of the ground.”
Alexis’ experience invested in an idea of cannabis being something far more natural – a
direct relationship with nature that the kinds of pharmaceutical industry relationships allowed.
But cannabis was as much a product of human intervention, technology, and fugitive capitalism,
a “socio-nature” – one still mediated by a cash relationship, and through the growing network of
dispensaries. (Though one could, as I will discuss, engage in their own grows.) What
distinguished cannabis medicine was where, how and why this knowledge came together, and
how the actors developing this economy understood the plant’s complexity.
Endocannabinoids and Shop-Floor Science
As experimentations with cannabis proliferated, budtenders and front-line workers in
dispensaries emerged as a critical new node for such knowledge; up to the 1990s and the rise of
the CBCs, much cannabis-related knowledge circulated directly between home/street
distributors, cultivators, and consumers. The addition of the dispensary in the supply chain
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offered a crucial nexus for grounding a growing science of the endocannabinoid system, which
viewed an integral, biocentric relationships among humans and cannabis. They became the basis
of what economic geographers sometimes called knowledge networks or “communities of
practice” - contributing to the industry’s expansion, exemplifying where tacit and scientific
knowledge meet and feed markets to transform how the commodity was understood and valued
(Amin and Roberts 2008; cf. Henry and Pinch 2000; Malmberg and Maskell 2002). Amin and
Roberts (2008) call for some more specificity when discussing these communities of practice,
and in this case, cannabis falls more in line with the kind of “craft” based, local knowledge
linked to trust and shared techniques, as much as a more creative “epistemic” community with
rapidly changing knowledge, built through temporary coalitions and “radical innovation
stimulated by contact with other communities” (2008: 360).
Uniquely informing this dynamic and layered epistemic community was the fact that a wide
majority of budtenders and dispensary staff were actively utilizing the plant. As Devan
explained, the staff “tried everything that went out on the floor.” In her mid-20s , she described
to me by the budtender who referred me to her as “the genius when it comes to the plant,”
worked at a central LA cannabis dispensary and moonlit in cultivation and as a medical assistant.
She viewed all three areas of work as interconnected, and spoke with confidence about the
medical validity of cannabis.
Athena was also one of these geniuses. One of the first storefront dispensary owners in the
city of Los Angeles, she opened a shop on the top floor of a South Bay strip-mall in the early
2000s. The dispensary began as a hydroponics shop, a means to supply the dozens of small
cultivators in the region, but Athena was quick to take advantage when the state legislature
opened up the possibilities for storefronts in the mid-2000s. She was also one of the first Black
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women operators of a public-facing dispensary and an unapologetic advocate with a penchant for
facing down federal agents and state inspectors. Athena described how she witnessed workers at
the front lines build the foundations of industry knowledge:
“I would train the budtenders, you know: when they come in there, ask [the patients] what
ails them because they need to make the recommendations. We would say, it’s very important to
know what meds you’re taking, where it is that you’re coming from, so, all of these questions
went into weekly quizzes that the patients had to take.” The questions also tackled the felt effects
of the purchases the patient was making and included questions such as: “What strain were you
using? How did you ingest it? How long did it take you to hit you? What were the effects that
you were feeling? You know, on a scale from such and such, what would you rate it?”

With data from patient surveys and the information from the budtenders, they started to form
an idea of how different strains were affecting patients. She would “make the girls research the
strains” in addition, and from all this information, “we would form books where I would take the
strains [and] spread the news with the others and share with the rest of the community.” During
our interview, Athena offered to give me a tour of the books on day at her home, which is a
veritable fugitive archive of the medical cannabis movement. The books documented the
experiences of a changing generation of medical marijuana users. In the now-closed shop, she
explained, “If anybody wanted to flip through the strains, not only would they get that but they
also got the documentation from other patients...I was formulating data that I was sharing with
everybody that walked in the door.” Her data was public, not proprietary, and accessible and was
predicated on trusting her patients’ grassroots experiments. Her end goal: “always about
education.”
These fugitive “communities of practice” across cannabis, advocates, budtenders and owner-
operators contributed, most significantly, to an emerging science regarding the endocannabinoid
system. This is a set of receptors throughout the body thought to control homeostasis, or the
ability to eat, sleep, relax, forget, and protect” (Di Marzo et al. 1998:522; Bridgeman and Abazia
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2017; McPartland et al. 2015). Cannabis phytocannabanoids, or plant-based cannabinoids, are
said to interact with these human cannabinoid receptors, leading to both potential therapeutic
effects or illness (McPartland et al. 2015; McPartland, Guy, and Di Marzo 2014).
26
The
relationship between the two was often framed as indicative as indicative of a natural affinity
among humans and cannabis; some interviewees called it symbiotic.
In line and in fact extending the existing research on endocannabinoids, many budtenders
cautioned to me that any human-plant interaction was going to be dependent on a wide number
of factors. Several budtender interviewees cited how everything from body weight to genetic
history, and as mentioned in Chapter 3, exposure to trauma, shaped usage and effects.
Participants across the supply chain understood cannabis and human interactions as
fundamentally contingent on numerous biological and even social factors. Some noted these
divergences were biological, due to factors like genetics. Others claimed they were shaped by
histories of racialized and gendered inequality. Another budtender, Kevin, explained: “THC,
CBD, THC-A, yes these are all part of the plants, but it also depended on someone’s personality,
their individuality, all would affect their experience.” Their understanding of this more affective
level was based in part on their own experiments with cannabis. “I want to be able to just say, oh
this product is good,” Devan continues “But each person is different, we can’t just say that…It
can even change day to day – smoking on a bad, day, I can go back to it and have a whole other
experience.”
This is Cindy’s “personalized medicine,” which was not just an approach to the person but
an orientation to the plant and its nature, and how these all interacted in complex ways. Valeria,

26
Some of the effects of a lack of endocannabinoid receptors or “deficient” functioning include migraines,
fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, as well as schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis (MS), Huntington’s disease,
Parkinson’s disease, anorexia, chronic motion sickness, and failure to thrive in infants (McPartland et al 2014).
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who was inspired to pursue environmental science and molecular biology from her time at the
dispensary, noted that unpredictability of medicine is something even mainstream
pharmacological science is loath to admit. The fact that workers were so closely involved in this
knowledge production may have helped ensure that its complexity was well-represented and that
there was a focus still on deepening knowledge of the plant, but not settling upon any simplistic
medical narratives.
The kinds of more institutionalized knowledge networks economic geographers often
discuss as supporting economic growth, like universities and research and development
relationships were not available to budtenders and others, given the ban on federal research not
directly related to the dangers of cannabis (Huggins, Johnston, and Steffenson 2008). As often-
BIPOC whose positions had limited some of their access to higher education, some of whom
described frustrating experience in punitive high school settings due to cannabis use, they were
also shut out from such pipelines. Knowledge of how human and plant cannabinoids interacted
was barely being documented in medical journals (who were finding the plant hard to easily
standardize), and far more at the hands of advocates and workers. I started to sense a very long
interaction and conversation in the making when someone would mention endocannabinoids at
an event. There was a passion and interest in in-depth from many people who had (like myself)
never taken biology beyond high school, yet who were ready at a moment’s notice to articulate
the complexity of the plant’s biology and the ways the human neurological and nervous system
was bound to this receptor network. (I found myself, finally with the answer to the perennial
question, “does anyone who isn’t an academic read peer-reviewed publications?”, as budtenders
and other workers asked me to help access the few medical journal articles on endocannabinoids,
employing their often-unpaid energy to furthering this knowledge.)
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While some journals and other international medical publications were emerging, much of
this information was still relatively new. Some advocates, like Erica, a West Hollywood cannabis
advocate who was working on the dream of a consumption lounge, suspected an active effort to
keep such information out of the public eye – by none other than Big Pharma. She shared the
struggles of colleagues she knew in a global research group that had “around 20,000 patients for
a long time now, for 15 years.” But, “they're trying desperately to get this published in medical
journals because there's nothing published…There's nothing published. So, the doctors are like,
"Well, it's not real. If it's not published, it's not real," right? Budtenders were working hard to
make the commodity “real” through alternative, interpersonal market circuits - taking the
networks and foundation set in the 1990s push new knowledge that would help ensure the
economy’s growth in Los Angeles.
The Learning Plant
The dynamic dispensary labor to understand what patients were experiencing and document
the range of effects (and affects) fundamentally changed the nature of the plant across the supply
chain, radically altering which strains were being produced and in what volume. In some shops,
different budtenders would develop specific expertise in the plant and interact directly with
different vendors; Ayanna’s, for example, was in relationship to CBD, and she would have to
learn, between patient experiences, “what was worth keeping.” Part of her decision to take this
task on in the shop was due in part to her own use of CBD-rich products to mitigate long-term
issues with anxiety and panic attacks. Her insights helped shift what cultivators would attempt to
select for in breeding and how.
27
“Word of mouth,” i.e. relationships among patients, helped

27
To some extent, this was different from home/street dealing’s more restricted market, where many generally had a
small number of strains, and often people took what they could find from a local provider, even it was “brick,”
“schwag,” or other product that still tasted like the tire it was shoved into to transport.
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drive interest also, whether online or in-person. Budtenders (and cultivators) collective
experiences provide an archive charting the emergence of different strains, like those that had
higher CBD. The fact that Northern California and over time, many more Southern California
indoor cultivators would quite literally travel in to shops to show product and converse gave a
clear way for knowledge to travel back and forth and shape production techniques. Again, firm
to firm relations, as economic geographers might say, relied upon front-line workers, who were
able to, as some business scholars might say, accelerate innovation through their interactions.
Strain names helped catalogue difference among the plant and hint to just some of the
interactions one (or one’s endocannabinoid’s) could have. Marijuana historians and journalists
have well documented how many of these originated from the 1960s forward; some included the
name of where the original seed was thought to come from (e.g. Afghan Kush); a large number
included the “flavor profile” (e.g. “Girl Scout Cookie” or “Tangie"); others for the sensation
some experience (e.g. Jesus OG, which is said to have included a euphoric or heavenly high),
and even others for marijuana activists (e.g. Jack Herer) (Geluardi 2016; Lee 2012).
28
Recent
studies of regional medical cannabis dispensary registries suggest that there are between 2,000 to
3,000 distinctly-named strains (Piper 2018; Sawler et al. 2015). Many of these are hybridized
and crossbred cannabis strains deriving from what are known as “landraces” – each of which has
been traced by cannabis growers and seed banks to different geographies, from Central and
South Asia, to Jamaica, Thailand, Malawi, South Africa, and Mexico – that as noted in Chapter
2, have been tied to both imperial incursions and fugitive flows (Clarke and Merlin 2016; Duvall
2019; Koutouki and Lofts 2018). In the 1970s and 1980s, the fact Netherlands had not outlawed

28
One particularly entertaining City Council REIN special meeting when Oregon regulators were invited to share
about their regulation structure, and an unusually-long discussion between officials ensued regarding the commodity
packaging and production locally, and whether or not strain names like “Jedi Kush” and “Girl Scout Cookies”
constituted as being marketed (and thereby dangerous) to children.
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hemp seed opened up the door for the growth of seed banks like Sensi Seeds that started to
document and trace this science through catalogues passed among fugitive networks, and
preserving the complexity of the plant. (Botanists and pharmacologists have also attempted to
study the genetics of such named strains, finding that the distinction at that level was sometimes
non-existent, and that even the assumed divide among indica and sativa plants did not translate to
a strictly genetic difference.)
The dispensary infrastructure dramatically boosted the capacity to catalogue, showcase and
test new strains and show what actually was different among them, even if it did not translate
genetically on the plant side or remain consistent. On the eve of adult-use legalization in
California, patients and budtenders alike had built an extensive, increasingly standardized yet
wholly de-institutionalized repertoire of potential effects, helped in more recent years by
websites like Leafly.com that document strains types. Like Athena’s binder-data, this includes
whether or not patients were reporting a change in appetite, heightened or lowered anxiety, and
any other set of factors that started becoming the markers of a plant’s effectiveness. More than
mapping exact phenomena, strains served more as an imprecise locus of potential experience;
most of these online were crowd-sourced through both internet users and through the
dispensaries, and intersected with older archives like Sensi Seeds to shape what was being
produced and for which markets.
It’s important to note that this catalogue did not just include directly-medicalized properties
like pain relief: it included elements of psychoactivity and non-productive elements like euphoria
or “couch-lock” (a zoned-out feeling), that were also equally important to the production of
commodified value in cannabis. Consumers and workers alike sought after what they saw as the
best high; this was loosely measured at times in THC content, but many I spoke to in interviews
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and in shops stressed how incommensurable this, too, was. Several shared how particularly
young patients were looking for something “fire,” the word (or often, the emoji) of the day
during many years of this project for a powerful high. Part of approximating how fire something
was also biological: more seeds, “stickiness,” or other such properties, all of whom could lead to
having to pay more for some “top-shelf” or “dank” strains versus other “mid-grade” ones.
Mainstream media, health officials and anti-drug groups locked into the interest in and
breeding for psychoactivity equated to THC to fuel public panics regarding cannabis. In summer
2018, I was asked to present some of my research at psychological research center that focused
on breaking beyond the addiction model. I was surprised to find the organizer, who had appeared
to be questioning narratives about drugs and addiction (focusing instead on the underlying
relationships they exhibited), talk about his concern with the ever-higher-levels of THC in
cannabis that might be generating psychosis. News outlets like Forbes spoke of an “arms race
towards creating super-potent cannabis” happening “for years,” that was only starting to break
with the prospect of legalization and the need to reach new consumers (Carpenter 2018) At the
same time, research repeatedly has demonstrated little evidence of “cannabis psychosis,” and
studies in European and US markets have found that markets remain dominated by strains with
less THC (Hall and Degenhardt 2000; Reinarman 2009). (The story is also dubious given that the
kind of spectrograph testing of THC is a recent phenomena, so no data actually exists of what an
imagined more innocent cannabis user was smoking in the 1960s.) The panic regarding
cannabis’ psychoactive biological properties tended to be, in my analysis, a significant part of
shifting racialization the drug that amplified in the 1990, that unfortunately sociological
ethnographers have been complicit in fomenting (Contreras 2012; Timberlake 2013). These
narratives hold young Black (and to a lesser extent, brown) male cannabis users (and gangster
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rap) as responsible for the dangerous desire for higher-potency “chronic” and a shift from small-
joint to “blunt” smoking - not to mention the associated rise in malt liquor- that supposedly led to
rampant violence.
29

To some budtenders and cultivators, the wide varieties of effects could never be summed up
into a singular set of measurable or quantifiable factors that made a strain worthwhile; as
Mariana told me, cannabis had to be summed up as a whole experience to which strain names
only hinted. (To put in in social science terms, in some of the internal store databases where staff
charted their and patient experiences, they operated far more like ethnographers and far less like
quantitative analysts). Strains were not commensurate with a supposedly strict pharmacological
or genetic analysis that could isolate compounds or discrete effects of strains. They were
powerfully relational.
More than the economy grew as cultivators, budtenders, and manufacturers found new ways
to valuate and put a price on cannabis. The further fugitive kinds of knowledge developed, the
more the plant itself was changing and learning. From the standpoint of a studies of socio-natural
commodities, cannabis evinced a “joint, co-constitutive processes between human and nature’s
agency” in which, even as strain production was diversified for a wide range of consumers, there
was still an open-ness to the plant’s ability to take its own directions (Peluso 2012:81; Sze et al.
2009). Budtenders and some owner-operators and advocates did not shy away from the
indeterminacy in human and more-than-human interactions that Tsing highlights (2015).
Drawing focus to this, and to the ways in which they related to the plant, allows us to, in Tsing’s
words, “expands our concept of human life, showing us how we are transformed by encounter”

29
(In fact, an entire subset of addiction studies emerged labeling the generation that grew up in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, of which I find myself counted, as the “blunt/marijuana” generation.” The good news is that our
prospects are supposedly far better than the preceding, equally racialized crack generation.) (Cole 2006; Contreras
2012; Golub et al. 2004; PhD, PhD, and PhD 2006; Timberlake 2013)
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(2012:47). Despite commodification processes, a vast fugitive, grassroots and global (if we think
of seed banks like Sensi and the proliferation of landraces from around the world) community of
practice protected a certain unpredictability and “wild”-ness of human and plant nature that is
often hollowed out by capitalist commodification (Peluso 2012:96). Such a process was more
than just about how one saw the plant and its diversity: it also facilitated different kinds of
relationships with others.
A Joint and A Little Conversation
Even as they were producing multiple repertoires of cannabis knowledge, many budtenders I
spoke too did not imagine themselves a medicalized expert as much as one with a shared interest.
“Sometimes, people come in with more knowledge than you, and it’s ok,” Erik, a 25-year old
Latinx budtender and 6-year veteran of medical cannabis work, shared. Even as they were
producing knowledge, budtenders saw themselves more as guiding people through a process of
experimentation and collaborative learning. “It was like, let’s take care of you, let’s talk about
your wellness, let’s have a great time,” Erik shared. “It’s the learning curve of it.” In many
ways, this mirrored how cannabis had developed as a “social” drug of sorts; cannabis has been
shared among friends and lovers, it could be collective, it is consumed often in interaction.
(Historically, cannabis in the US has been policed precisely for these kinds of interactions it
supposedly fostered. From the South and Southwest in the 1920s to US suburbia in the 1950s
and 1960s, police agencies and conservatives labeled marijuana as a gateway to interracial
encounters among Black, brown and white farmworkers; in jazz and blues clubs; at queer parties
and across dangerous, racialized cities (Torgoff 2017).]
The kinds of interactions produced on the floor and the orientation of budtenders (and many
owner-operators and cultivators) not only brought together people across lines of class, race and
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gender, it also helped maintain blurred lines among the medicinal and “adult-use” projects, a
comfortable ambiguity that prevented any narrow version of commodification. These blurred
lines were not just about getting more people through the door (and thus bringing more profit to
operators) – though that helped for sure. For many at the front lines, they were ways to build
different kinds of collective and experiential value. “Sometimes it’s just a regular, coming in to
grab a joint and a little conversation.” Within this relationship, other social ends were met: Erik
particularly recalls, in the first shop where he worked, engaging with many “downtown Los
Angeles locals,” some who were unhoused, who would buy just a little weed to get through the
day, and in some sense, find shelter.
Within this – and considering the holistic experience many were cultivating through the
plant – other desires were acceptable, including the queer and deviant (cf. Hwang 2010, Cohen
1997). You could to be perfectly blunt, help someone unhoused get high to get through an awful
day, and probably hook him up with free medicine; you could help an elderly woman try an
edible just for the hell of it; you could help select the right strain (or, more recently, cannabis-
infused lubricant) for sex. These weren’t outliers or extremes, and this isn’t about shock value;
these were common conversations I would come up against on a dispensary floor. What these
and Erik and Kevin’s relationships reflect is a kind of relationality that did not view the people
they were serving through a narrow construction of “helping”; it was not about re-enacting, for
example, a kind of policing of the unhoused or working class embodied in many health and
social work relationships, but again more in tune with the kinds of queer mutual aid described in
Chapter 3 (Stuart 2016; Wacquant 2009; Websdale 2001; Wright 1997). Doing so meant directly
confronting not only cannabis stigmatization, but the exclusion of and violence towards
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unhoused, Black and brown people with mental health struggles, and other “misfits” in many
urban spaces, especially throughout a rapidly-gentrifying city.
Expanding the bounds of fugitive care and science from the foundation set in the 1980s and
1990s CBCs, budtenders were able to discover fundamental new directions in cannabis
knowledge that were increasing their ability to meet the needs of racialized and gendered
populations. Gina worked in cannabis over a decade across California, and shared a particularly
experience at a Tenderloin-area dispensary in San Francisco:
“I remember this older black gentleman with Tourette’s came in..I remember I first heard
about CBD from him. I had it on the [daily strains dry-erase ]board; we often put a note, here’s
what we got, ask us about them. He specifically asked for it; word had got out on the street about
it. I remember him and I having a forty-five minute conversation. We called someone up from
the basement, we were like, hold up, let’s learn more about this, tell us what it’s doing to you.”

Queer and working class, Gina understood that getting this right and honing CBD could be a
matter of life or death for him. “He was an older queer Black man on the street – driven by the
illness, and having an episode, could lead to physical injury from the police and civilians.”
Tracking his changes over time, she understood CBD could be a “game changer,” and they
began to order different strains. She would soon take that knowledge to a larger dispensary and
training facility to provide CBD for children. In shops around California, like Gina and
Melinna’s, a whole science of CBD was developing through relationships that were always
shadowed by racialized inequality, but also solidarities.
Confronted with the ever-present possibility of their patients’ death, and at times entering at
a critical terminal moment, many budtenders felt the experimental nature of their work limited
their ability to provide solutions, at time. Devan explains, “I know we have to be careful,”
sharing the importance of a process of recommending and testing products with patients. But, in
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some cases, “time is limited” for the patients, she explains, so they had to make tough choices
about how to help alleviate suffering for the short remainder of one’s life.
With the lack of a traditional medical relationship and the ability to even call someone at
their home, losing a patient could come suddenly. Melinna explains:
There are some people, you know what it means when they stop coming in and we just have
to be like, we hope the transition was nice for them. We helped them out as much as we
could - gave them as much as education. I hope the end of their life was what they expected,
what they hoped for. We may have been their last resort.

Opening oneself to learning from the plant and learning from others was a risky enterprise;
as much as it was rife with new solidarities, it was also inescapably connected to both life and
death. Death was never far.
As Gina’s comments also point out, many budtenders were aware, too, of the racialized and
gendered nature of who and how cannabis served, and how patients’ social location affected the
prospects of survival and quality of life. Whether they named it or not, they were the front line
for many health disparities by race, class and gender, much as the CBCs had been in the front
lines of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The desire to generate new forms of collective care and value in a
city rife with health disparities also exposed budtenders to the systematic nature of “premature
death” Gilmore, the “fatal couplings of power and difference” endemic to racial capitalism
(2002, 2007). Even after the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis, new generations of cannabis
dispensary workers, too, began to link the race, gender, class and the production of health
disparities – that cannabis came to in some ways to mitigate, or at the least to which cannabis
responded. While situated in a broader geography, Gina’s experience highlights the connections
being made: “The neighborhood was heavily Latinx, and we kept seeing the same symptoms
among families. This is not proven, but I will say this, the fact that Oakland, and especially East
Oakland is a pile of superfund sites stacked on each other - there is some kind of connection.”
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The “ailments were extremely uncommon in the big picture, and it can’t just be group selection
bias - that doesn’t really jive.” She surmised links among “the most insane volumes of pollutants
in the area and the statistically aberrant disease presence” the dispensary was helping treat.
Dené, Chickasaw and Black, Dr. Hope recognized sought in her research to document what
was often vaguely referred to as the “self-medicating” communities of color did in response to
health inequities and political and economic dislocations. At time of writing she was seeking
funding to understand cannabis use in South Los Angeles (where there was a high concentration
of dispensaries) and undiagnosed and diagnosed PTSD, depression and anxiety. She read the
latter as being produced in relationship to neighborhood inequalities, and was looking to prove
this. She had prior launched a study examining use of cannabis among transgender women of
color to aid in the easing the effects of hormonal therapy. On the flipside, she feared that these
kind of existing ways of treatment would be lost with commodification. Legalization could keep
driving prices high for more “quality” medicine, while leaving out those who had come to rely
on this relationship with the plant for both specific health reasons, and to make life more livable.
No Es Marijuana, Es Cannabis
The importance of the medicalization of cannabis to both legitimizing the plant towards
legalization and accruing value in the market became even more clear as legalization proceeded
– evident in the rise and interest in CBD. As disabled and queer patients and workers were
organizing to save dispensaries from raids in LA, the national public narrative on cannabis and
children only showed signs of significantly shifting with the debut of CNN’s Chief Medical
Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s 2013 documentary “Weed” discussing the case of, among
others, Charlotte Figi, who suffered from seizures due to Dravet syndrome. Wheelchair-bound
and suffering 300-plus seizures a week, she took a strain low in THC and high in cannabidiol
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(CBD), as her parents struggled to access the plant and faced fears of jail. (The documentary was
so influential that one budtender and medical consultant I interviewed referred to pre- and post-
Gupta era.) This knowledge spread, too, among internet sites and social media, but parents found
legal regimes hard to shift given the aforementioned racialized moral panics of the “war on
drugs” centered on youth and its entanglements across different institutions, like child welfare.
While Dr. Gupta attached his name (after initially rejecting cannabis as medicine) to the industry,
much of the science regarding the drug was being drawn from expanding grassroots labor.
While it is beyond the scope of this dissertation to fully chart this transformation, speaking
to those who had front-row seats for these shifts - and in-depth looks at media regarding
marijuana - redefining a politics of cannabis to render it less criminalized meant centering CBD
as an identifiable and fungible object. The molecular property became a stand-in for an
altogether different cannabis, a material articulation of the medicinal properties of cannabis
minus the threats of psychoactivity – one that opened up avenues for profit while recasting the
industry. In many ways, it became the pharmacological extract became the commodity, and the
histories of marijuana could be cast aside to ensure new consumers.
In summer 2018, Selena, the UFCW and local community partners held a training for
mostly-Latinx residents of the working class the San Fernando Valley suburbs. The project had
multiple goals, including helping drive interest in social equity programs and community
reinvestment highlighted in Chapter 6. The second presenter, Mike, was from a local drug
prevention organization that had in the last year changed its tune on prevention to be more
centered in harm-reduction. In his 40s and having witnessed the full swing of the war on drugs in
Los Angeles, Mike explained to the crowd (mostly Latinas in their 50s on to their 70s):
“Marijuana no es cannabis! El CBD es medical, y bueno.” (Marijuana is not cannabis! CBD is
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medical, and good!).
30
He confessed that as a youth, he had smoked marijuana like “he was
drinking milk,” and stopped cold turkey as a young adult; now he understood there were
different forms that had particular effects on autism, seizures and other conditions that were
affecting Latinx youth. He contrasted a “informed” approach to using CBD to other forms of
medicine that were “ruining youth” like OxyContin, that a child could “take at party and die.”
Like many, he raised the specter of opioids to justify a more “natural” route.
To be fair, the very same presentation, Selena, the main organizer shared about the 70 types
of cannabis that were not psychoactive, including the importance of THCA. But Mike’s
comments and the ways they were reiterated in the question and answer session reflected a
growing tendency to portray CBD-heavy cannabis as something wholly different than those with
active THC compounds. Mike’s distinction linking one compound to cannabis and the other to
marijuana signaled a shifting racialization of the plant. As noted in Chapter 2, the association
with the word marijuana and criminalization had roots in the US/Mexico Southwest/borderlands
and later national cannabis prohibition in the 1920s. During that time, US policymakers, the
American Medical Association, and others attempted to attach the plant to increasing migration
from Mexico by labeling it legally (via the 1937 Marihuana tax act) as marijuana versus
cannabis (Campos 2012; Marez 2004). The latter construction of marijuana has been
documented and well-debated, with Campos (2012) showing that the construction of marijuana
as illegal and undesirable is a transnational one due to the linking of cannabis with Mexican
revolutionaries and prisoners by Mexican elites in the early 20
th
Century.
What is new and worth highlighting is the way in which the intrinsic biology of the plant
began to be re-interpreted in order to show its value as commodifiable medicine. The old,

30
While I translate other quotes into English, in this case the distinction between marijuana and cannabis is key, and
speaks to the associations the word carries in Spanish.
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racialized “marijuana” could be dismissed by valorizing “cannabis.” Doing so also meant
veering from the more incommensurable nature of the plant, its experiential and holistic
qualities, and instead honing on a singular, disconnected biological property that could be
marketed and sold, altering the fundamental relationship with this more-than-human being.
Over the course of research, policymakers instituted new legal frameworks enshrining this
distinction, leading to the rise of an entire CBD-“only” industry, with CBD being extracted from
cannabis plants and put into a multiplicity of other products, from coffee to topicals (the latter
due to the purported anti-inflammatory and “relaxing” properties). Low-THC and CBD-rich
strains could also qualify to be more widely grown via the 2017 Farm Bill which legalized the
growing of hemp, legally defined as having less than .3% THC content.
31
For most of my
fieldwork, though, the emphasis was on cannabis strains rich in CBD, and extract products like
sublingual sprays that had larger concentrations of CBD to THC (the aforementioned 3:1s or
even 5:1 or 10:1s).
Different from the prior rise in CBD-rich cannabis strains, these developments in 2018, 2019
and into writing were not done with much regard for patients or out of a grassroots science. The
decision to do so could be attributed to a wide range of corporations, from cosmetic
manufacturers to coffee to even the large luxury retailer Barney’s, seeking to take advantage of
the new federal loophole to market a whole new generation of products from makeup to juice
and alcohol additives to lotion. (The profit-driven embrace of this was confirmed by a large
beauty conglomerate marketing head who I interviewed. He explained, “Most of it isn’t even real
– it’s mass produced, it’s a joke” and that the company mostly infused CBD in makeup for
marketing purposes.).

31
This distinction of .03% had been the repeated subject of visible scoffing by cannabis activists, not the least of
which is related to the challenges with the measurement of this property, and its arbitrary nature.
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The CBD market boom also proceeded counter to what the grassroots budtenders,
cultivators and research had found in their work. As Cindy and others emphasized to me, her
initial trials and that of other researchers was finding that it seemed impossible to extract CBD
from the plant, remove most THC and still retain the medicinal properties. CBD might provide
certain soothing, but there was something about the integrity of the plant that was becoming
more and more clear with these new distinctions. Advocates, researchers, and workers I spoke
to began using terms like the “full spectrum” and “entourage effect” to legitimize the need to
reconsider the push for CBD-only (McPartland and Russo 2001; Russo 2019). Dr. Hope had
many ideas in this regard, including the presence of an even larger number of compounds
affecting the endocannabinoid system, from THC-A, to CBD-A, and the intrinsic
interconnections between those that were limited. As she noted, many of these properties of the
whole plant were well-known outside the US – though not necessarily named as distinct
compounds– in Jamaica and other Black, indigenous and Latinx diasporic sites, where
communities used cannabis in alcohol tinctures or ate raw cannabis leaves in ways that created
more interaction with these other elements like THC-A.
A recent plant biology article affirmed what many knew, citing “the case for Cannabis
synergy via the ‘entourage effect’ is currently sufficiently strong as to suggest that one molecule
is unlikely to match the therapeutic and even industrial potential of Cannabis itself as a
phytochemical factory” (Russo 2019). Attempts to synthesize cannabis molecules have also
similarly faltered, suggesting there is much in the integrity of the plant and the dynamic more-
than-human relationships. If cannabis is indeed kin, it is a stubborn one that refuses to be cast
aside for a cheap replica or a hollow version of itself.
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Of course, if you had asked a medical marijuana-era budtender or cultivator about the limits
of extracting CBD or synthesizing it, they would not have been surprised. When discussing
challenges on the job, Devan described the difficulties with helping patients grasp the full
properties of marijuana as the CBD-craze set in: “Just today had someone come in, and we had
to bring in the managers and supervisors both. She said she had come in a few days ago, and she
said she was hallucinating. She asked for something that wouldn’t get her high, but was
frustrated when what she took did give her some kind of high.”
Devan believed the patient was given fair notice: “The budtender she spoke too was very
credible, and I believe they warned her 100 percent. Nothing is non psychoactive: CBD is
psychotropic.” We were speaking in 2018, and she was describing ever-widening
misunderstanding regarding the ability to utilize cannabis without any sort of “high.” Following
some conversation, the patient came to term with this reality: “Today, she came back, and said
she had a good night’s sleep. I think that she just had to realize there was no way around it.”
In another conversation, Mariana believed that budtenders would continue to be a critical
sources of a more “whole” knowledge regarding cannabis. I suggest their doing so has been
predicated on continually confronting the racialization of cannabis, resisting the impulse to
separate medicine from pleasure, and retaining the histories of care and mutuality that
reverberate from the CBCs to the jazz and blues eras. Ultimately, they have a unique role, along
with cultivators and manufactures, at preserving cannabis’s roots in multi-diasporic and fugitive
science and care, in organic intellectual life.
Of course, there is no overestimating or romanticizing – and plenty of cultivators or
budtenders were not concerned with any of these even prior to legalization. But a committed
network of front-line workers and operators did stake their claim in this project affirming life in
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the shadow of premature death. In many ways their success continually put them at risk: the
more fugitive practitioners uncovered the layered properties of cannabis, the newer actors were
attracted to the plant and legalization became more imperative. Eventually, such tensions led to
new business in the market splintering cannabis into its bare molecules to expand profits.
The Possibilities in a Plot
The socio-natural relations and networks of knowledge shaping cannabis as a commodity
(and its value) were fundamentally spatial, and tied to layered histories of settler-colonialism and
plantation relations, as much as to fugitive geographies to craft one’s plot. With the outlawing of
cannabis in the 1930s, growing practices often were restricted to smaller-scale production – at
times subsistence or home-grow – informed by an entire set of practices that for a long time, was
passed through a few published books (often called bibles), through magazines, through person-
to-person exchanges and eventually facilitated via the global seed trade noted above (Geluardi
2016; Lee 2012). The home-grow industry in cannabis is tied geographically to both Alta and
Norte California, and to the Nixon-era war on drugs crackdown in Mexico described in Chapter
2 that led to the boom in Green Triangle cultivation.
The expansion of cannabis policing had other kinds of unintended consequences, including
the proliferation of new growing technology in this dense Northern California regional
economy– which some I spoke to described as being borrowed from indigenous forms of
cultivation and knowledge in Mexico (Mariner 2014). Militarized policing, including a multi-
agency, highly militarized enforcement project known as Campaign Against Marijuana Planting
in California (from 1985 to 2012), thus pushed cultivators to operate in a much smaller scale
than what was occurring in Mexico, including both the rise of new “guerilla grows” and the
move indoor (Corva 2014). Home growing proved a challenge to scale up and to also recreate
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the kind of conditions that would benefit plants. According to cannabis industry “anecdotal
evidence,” the use of hydroponics in cannabis first began in Hawai’i, utilizing Perlite material
derived from volcanic rock and ash in the 1980s (Elder 2017). The cannabis industry had
boomed on the islands following the collapse of the sugar industry, growing up, in other words,
in the ecological ruins of colonialism, which led to experimentation with how elements of the ash
could be combined with different fibers to create a soil alternative.

With this knowledge
spreading to California and the intensification of CAMP, indoor growing using hydroponics or
rich soil became a vital production method that helped cultivation extend outside of the North.
On the flipside, CAMP and local racialized enforcement embodied in Los Angeles’
militarized police boom in the 1980s drove up the price of cannabis and thus provided both the
need for and capital necessary to construct indoor infrastructures, including off-the-grid
generators and water systems (Corva 2014; Murch 2015; Polson 2013). From the perspective of
producing socio-natures, it would not be far-fetched to suggest that the contradictory policing
and boom in cannabis offered substantial advancement in hydroponic growing techniques in Los
Angeles in particular. This made for perhaps strange bedfellows among future-oriented
agricultural experiments by NASA starting in the 1970s in partnership with new hydroponic
companies like General Hydroponics that were subtly servicing the expanding indoor growing
production (Danko 2016) . Jery, a young Latinx farmer, mused with me that like cannabis,
hydroponics extends back to the Aztec era, to pre-Colombian farmers utilizing “hanging
gardens” suspended in air. (Architects and historians have written about this under such titles as
“Cultivating the Secrets of Aztec Gardens.”) Hydroponic production occurs without soil and
involves infusion of nutrients directly to the roots in measured ways, alongside suspension within
water. Despite what it sounds, such production techniques actually consume far less water than
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soil-based agriculture, given that the focus is far more on the nutrient process and water can be
recycled in different ways. Cannabis farmers were experimenting in ways that might ensure a
more sustainable food system, in the face of continued ecological crisis.
“Hydroponics: it’s the farming of the future, along aquaponics, which can feed a village a
country – that’s what it was the drove this,” Athena explained. She opened up one of the first
hydroponic stores within Los Angeles, before launching the dispensary noted above. Her shop
became an essential networking space for emerging gardeners to meet each other. During the
day, each person “had their garden, their little Emily’s Garden, and at night we would play poker
together, into the night.” Business was done in these informal moments, but so too were
relationships built and information exchanged regarding different planting techniques, new
hybridization methods, nutrient knowledge, best watering and light practices and other
cultivation practices. (These kind of exchanges still occur today in what are called farmer’s
markets at the legal margins; at time of writing, a large such gathering in Fresno was raided by
state agencies and local police.) Cultivators also shared their own seeds and cuttings to help
create new cross-breeds. Many I spoke to did so out of a passion and excitement to know each
other – one that was not restricted by the kinds of patents and propertied regimes of information
that dominate biomedical and agro-capitalist industries.
Those I spoke to and a few existing journalistic resources offer differing accounts as to what
drove indoor cultivation’s expansion larger boom in the late 2000s. Some accounts claim that
due to increasing supply, and the restructuring of the recession, prices in fact dropped for the
plant, making it harder for Northern California outdoor farmers to survive on their usual high-
priced products (Mariner 2014). Some in the North also moved to more greenhouse grows, that
allowed them to grow year-round instead of the more unpredictable, slower cycles of outdoor
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cultivation. Others I spoke to discussed how outdoor cultivation could not meet the expansive
need for consumers, in general, that was driving price competition – which fits in some part with
the timeline where dispensaries exploded across Los Angeles. If we think about the classic
regional agglomeration models, it would make sense to lessen transaction and other costs by
bringing product closer to an expanding market, rather than deal with the risks of losing product
along California’s highways.
During this time, too, new real estate abandoned by global capital opened up for setting up a
fully indoor growing economy. One owner, Arik, described how extensive the scope of
cultivation was within Los Angeles, especially in the San Fernando Valley. He noted that
landlords were more than happy to fill warehouses with shuttered manufacturing and more
recently, a collapsing adult film industry (“internet killed that,” he chimed in). This led to a tacit
acceptance of these facilities among police and policymakers as well, given how many these
operations started to employ.
“You drive around Van Nuys, Chatsworth, Sun Valley, all these communities in San
Fernando Valley.. you had all that community in industrial, manufacturing and commercial
zoned land – vacant. If you go and shut down all the grows that are there now – vacancy goes up.
At minimum, each is employing 5 to 10 workers. Even if it’s only 1000 growers, that’s a lot of
people out of work. But to be honest it’s realistically 50,000 workers; you go to the county, it’s
at least 100k – just simple math man. Who wants to see that?”

The proliferation – and perhaps tacit approval – of cultivation and manufacturing was due in
part to a larger set of available industrial properties, particularly warehouse and manufacturing
space within Los Angeles proper. The shifting tides of defense spending moved massive capital
northward towards Washington state’s aerospace, and to the Southern rust belt. These left
swaths of what economists call “fixed capital” stagnating in place. Beyond the San Fernando
Valley, small cities in the Southeast and towards Long Beach also saw growth in indoor and
manufacturing facilities.
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The price of industrial rent jumped to about $.94/sf in 2002 and 2003 in the County, then
started to slow down to $.62/sf in 2007. By 2010-2011, rents were on the rise again to a peak of
$1.00/sf (NAI Capital 2019). County-wide, a boom in the construction of warehouses had been
driven by the rise of global imports and goods movement through the Los Angeles and Long
Beach port, and was concentrated beyond Los Angeles City proper and in small city industrial
areas. As Juan De Lara explains, this boom hinged upon three interconnected factors: inflated
projections of growth, “new finance products and innovations,” and standardized production
methods facilitating ties to global manufacturing (De Lara 2018:143). Los Angeles had a
different pool of industrial properties, compared to the neighboring counties like San Bernardino
and Riverside, where corporate logistics chains were pushing cities to develop massive
warehouses. Land for development of that scale was much smaller, and instead was mostly used
by smaller retail and specialized production. There were more ideal for small-scale cannabis
cultivation. From the perspective of real estate capital and landlords, abandoned cultivation
facilities that did get raided could also be easily switched out with the next small producer,
especially because in these cases build-out was necessary. There was no shortage of new, small
growers ready to take one’s place, to landlords’ benefit.
32

32
This is not to say that the larger region was not entangled in a mix of growing. (It’s important to note that the
distinctions between indoor and outdoor were not always so clear, as there were partial greenhouses and hoop-house
structures more prevalent in the exurbs). Like Northern California’s San Joaquin Valley, the wider Inland Empire
were also seeing small cultivation and manufacturing operations, but these were more intermixed in smaller cities
and residential areas. This landscape included parts of the Antelope Valley (included in Los Angeles County), as
well as areas in Riverside and San Bernardino. Small cities like Anza in the Anza Valley, between Mount San
Jacinto and smaller hill and mountain areas of the high desert, had also emerged as hubs of both indoor and outdoor
cannabis growing. Much like the Emerald Triangle, their relative isolation and a “local’ culture (which likely had its
own back-to-land imaginaries) had facilitated a boom in the small desert towns. The growing number of large,
ranch-style developments facing foreclosure in the area also opened up space and capital. Once again, cannabis
found root in the ruins of what De Lara calls “speculative settler economies” (2018).

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Los Angeles’ rise as a capital of indoor cultivation hinged upon this infrastructure that was
helping stave off real estate collapse, and keeping these tracts of industrial areas busy, mortgages
paid and banks satisfied. It also offered opportunities to a wide range of BIPOC workers whose
routes would otherwise be low-wage, mind-numbing (maybe even goods movement) labor – or
no work at all. Depending on the size of the operation, a more small-scale cooperative grow
could include just a few individual cultivators working together, while in others, there were
people filling in different roles from watering to harvesting to other stages, overseen by “master
growers.” The year-round grows also meant the ability to produce faster to meet both demand
and to experiment quicker with different strains and production (again made easier by being
closer to consumers, sharpening feedback loops).
Different from the cultivation industries in Northern California, a larger portion of Black,
Latinx, indigenous and API growers and other workers filled the many roles needed to advance
this infrastructure. While Northern California growers were by no means all white (and relied
also on migrant Latinx labor at times), the exact demographics of this industry is impossible to
secure, as this was the most invisible part of the cannabis infrastructure. It was also never
officially licensed in Los Angeles during the medical marijuana period. (Instead, shops were
imagined to be vertically integrated in the different attempts to regulate starting in 2007,
probably in part to prevent wading into the fact that indoor products were going all over the
country.) But a strong indication emerged when a large number of cultivators of color appeared
during Los Angeles’ adult-use legalization roll-out, attending different informational events to
see what their prospects might be in going above-board and many applying for licensing.
Interviewees also confirmed this kind of diversity. Like Erik, Valeria and Jonathan, many of
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these young cultivators became experts and pioneers in a complex fugitive botanical science and
systems widely unrecognized by (and excluded from) any formal certification.
Like outdoor cultivators, this multi-racial cohort of cultivators developed an almost
personalized and intimate relationship with the plant that persisted across the growth of LA’s
medical marijuana economy. Cannabis growers and cultivation workers, in other words, had no
problem “making kin” in ways that would make Haraway, Tsing and other scholars of the more-
than-human proud (Haraway 2013; Tsing 2012). “Master growers” or now, many planters I
spoke to would often refer to the plants as their “babies.” They often spoke of cannabis as a
living being that was fickle, indeterminate, and needed intensive care. Erik shared that most
knowledge, while technical and particular, was person to person. “I leeched off others to learn.
My friend took me to his grow op, taught me the whole cycle from seed to flowering. But you
also have to put everything to the side and do your own research. There is a depth to how much
people have created this, and learned to raise this plant like a child.”
Devan explained her own delicate dance. “I try not to touch it in the initial stages. You have
to learn to let it grow.” She planted in what was called “Coco” (sometimes called “coir”), a
substrate replacement for soil made of coconut fiber dust and other byproducts of coconut
production. As Devan explained, there was a risk depending on the Coco to hold water, and you
had to let it drain substantially. Coco is an essential part of partially hydroponic hydroculture for
cannabis; it, too, was sustainable or at the least in principle with full use of a plant, produced as
scraps and residue from mass-scale production of coconuts for global markets.
Indoor cultivation, like budtending was intimate, intensive work, a relational process but
also required significant energy and willingness to learn outside of any strict workday, and was
always being understood in relationship to a legal policing regime that would cleave such
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kinship. This was more than the kinds of speculative kin-making practice that Haraway
describes, but a material relationality tied to personal and community survival (i.e. helping
supply patients). It was entangled in criminalizing state violence but also in a widening tradition
among marginalized cultivator-experts, or rather, organic intellectuals at the edges of plantation
life (cf. Woods 2002, Gramsci (Gramsci 2000; Woods 1998).
When read alongside the mutual aid and relationality of budtending, such an expanding
geography echoes some broader histories of Black ecological projects that promote “alternative
ways of being while confronting, refusing, and resisting racial violence,” in this case, of carceral
violence and organized abandonment (Davis et al. 2019:115). Davies and colleagues trace Black
alternative ecological practices back to the geography of the plot (a central ideal also raised by
Jamaican feminist Sylvia Wynter), to the form of enslaved people’s cultivation for sustenance
and West African genealogies of “good use,” all of which had to survive in the shadow of the
plantation (Davis et al. 2019; Wynter and McKittrick 2014). While indoor cultivation was not
always literally good use – in the sense of some of the destructive uses of resources – it still
offered a survival-landscape amidst waves of economic restructuring.
This link to the plot is not just metaphor. Dr. Hope explicitly laid out a place for cannabis
cultivation in this geography: she shared histories of cannabis hidden in the back-teeth and hair
of the enslaved workers brought across the Atlantic. “It was kind of ironic,” she noted, as some
enslaved people were being brought on boats with hemp sails being cultivated (she estimates) in
what is now Mexico and other places by Black and indigenous enslaved people, while they also
had “the seed and plant stuck everywhere.” She is not sure whether indigenous populations
already had access, but they did cultivate also. (Gina also confirmed working with numerous
indigenous cultivators today in Mexico, who have been planting their own strains that actually
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are CBD-rich, but are totally out of the global cannabis strain-circuits). Cannabis, Dr. Hope
emphasized, continued to move as seeds with enslaved people, later migrants, soldiers, part of
“normal, human tendency, to take things with you from the land, this plant is part of your
home.”
33
In Jamaica, such exchange was also facilitated by West Indian servants brought by the
British to labor on the sugar plantations, who shared their plants with enslaved residents as it
became an essential part of survival in the fields (Warf 2014). Building deep, ingenious
relationships with cannabis placed contemporary young cultivators in this intergenerational
diasporic lineage, and signified cannabis’ own way of surviving and growing beyond plantation
geographies.
Of course, such tight kinship, in the current moment, has to be also understood as shaped by
the monetary and commodity relationship: Part the precious nature of these “babies” is shaped by
the fact that with a commodity as valued as this, one cannot simply throw away or lose crop to
scale. Cultivation was still living, too, in the shadow of monoculture and adapting practices that
were more geared to market production that simply ecological well-being. Cultivators have also
willing to help reshape those babies at times to adjust to consumer demands. This included
producing plants, like the “purp” strains, that were able to bring better highs and other non-
medical attributes, that refused certain normative limits and played with desire.
There is much more to say about the expansion of cultivation in Los Angeles, but this brief
exploration helps better situation these elements of relationality and value-generation, in relation
to racial capitalist geographies and counter-geographies.
34
Many of these actors in indoor

33
In a finding that would make CLR James proud, she noted how out of these flows, some of the “best weed comes
from Haiti” since the era of the rebellion, but that cannabis has never made it to global markets because it never was
marketed in the same way that Jamaica’s was, the latter being more tied to transnational commodity circuits.
34
There is also much more to say about an entire cannabis extraction industry that was particularly expansive in Los
Angeles. This seems to have arisen out of the desire to create new kinds of escape and pleasure through a wide range
of processes from lipid or oil separations to alcohol and ethanol to biomass extraction, and built as part of tight
feedback loops among the consumers, dispensaries and producers. These led to whole new classes of waxes,
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cultivation are often discounted, most especially by Northern California’s growers who even in
public media refer to them as “thugs” and through racist language tying these developments to
transnational Mexican (and sometimes Chinese and Armenian) crime networks. They are
assumed to have developed indoor techniques – which do have significant risks – merely for
profit, with many hearkening back to an assumed past of a “natural” cannabis relationship. Yet –
as I have sought to outline – there has never been a cannabis that was wholly uncorrupted or not
already entangled in capitalism, nor on the flipside were indoor cultivators simply money-hungry
proto-capitalists. Indoor growers represented the latest iteration in the complex networks
developing the plant, building a fugitive world of survival, deeply-felt social and emotional value
and at times, possibility for change, right in the shadow of the plantation.
Cannabis Itch and Other Mono-cultural Risks
Many Northern cultivators and outside advocates, though, did pinpoint the ways that indoor
cultivation expanded the negative impact on the environment via cannabis, given the vast
consumption of resources, even with hydroponics. Some saw these practices destroy the Green
Triangle’s groundwater and soil, especially as increasingly-wealthier ranchers and counterculture
migrants dug huge bunkers and infrastructure underground to avoid police (Mariner 2014). Yet
such practices, in the eyes of indoor and greenhouse cultivators, became more and more
important to meet expanding market demand and to rectify the expanded surveillance
technologies that would lead to continual raids on outdoors planting.

“shatter,” honey oils and other concentrated products that have been tied to a much-maligned “dab” culture, that has
also been swept up in racialized THC-hysteria. Yet many of the young BIPOC men and women who developed this
science are also often unrecognized, innovating with all kinds of off-market cylinders and other technoloiges they
are passionate about in ways that would rival any professional biochemist. In future work, they merit further chance
to share their complex socio-natural story.
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Yet so many of the new technologies employed were experimental and often came with a
massive carbon footprint. Light systems in warehouses were meant to emulate the kinds of light
produced in different vegetative and flowering states – at the earliest stages of use of high-
intensity discharge (HID) lamps, it was metal-halide for the former and high-pressure sodium for
the latter. With indoor grows, an entire science of air conditioning and heat has to arise, also
upping infrastructure and capital costs, not to mention impacts on climate. But it was essential to
survival: “Ventilation is so hard: If you keep it sealed too tight mold could grow. If not, you let
in too much air that can kill a sensitive plant,” Andrea, another young cultivator shared. Mold
was one of the more common issues with not only growing, but product being sold in
dispensaries. Both cultivators and budtenders reported encountering mold and finding their
managers or owners trying to mask it. Desperate vendors often found ways to hide the presence
of mold before selling it, or some budtenders were tasked with this concealment.
Stephanie, a budtender in a series of shops in East LA, explained to me that the more she
worked in shops, the more she was careful where the cannabis she ingested came from:
Stephanie: Yeah, it’s hard because either you’ve got to build the money to spend on some
party stuff or you’re just going to get mold in your body and that’s really bad to - it’s
really hard to get rid of mold once it’s in the body you know? Or the plant.

Me: Yeah?

Stephanie It just grows more. So, I learned that.

Me How did you learn that?

Stephanie Just by working like no one’s going to tell you. Just you see like because I
would also trim and stuff so I’d see like how dirty it could be. And even the largest
breeders like [a LA indoor cultivator] they sell to everybody like across the LA, they’re
like some of the messiest, dirtiest flower.

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The expansion of cannabis indoor cultivation, especially as legalization loomed and some
operations scaled up, was also labor intensive. Devan, shares, “You can’t just water the same,
you have to know the plants. That one doesn’t look as heavy, give it a little extra here. That one
could look dry, but it’s still okay. You can mess it up so easily and have to keep it controlled.”
She didn’t trust timers alone, or any technology that could risk upsetting a delicate growth
process when unattended. In many grows, there are specific roles for workers who handle
watering alone and learn to tell these aspects from sight. The kinds of intimate relationships with
the plant had to be amplified across thousands at one time, a challenging task for any grower.
While in places like Mexico, outdoor grows continues to be cultivated among other plants
(hence the slang term lechuga, for marijuana grown among lettuce fields), cannabis cultivation
facilities – indoor or outdoor – were for the most part monocultural. The primary form of
cannabis cultivation involved the breeding of sinsemilla - flowering female plants that were
produced without seeds. These unfertilized female plants instead produce a kind of false seed
pod and large flowers that contain larger qualities of consumer-desired THC. A plant’s genetic
lines includes larger leaves and surfaces for fertilization, and thus also increase the volume and
kind of trichomes that produce different “flavors” and qualities.
Indoor growing lent itself to producing sinsemilla, as open-air cultivation often led to wind-
based breeding (the more common way of cannabis plant reproduction). The shift to indoor
grows ironically facilitated one of the main ways that anti-cannabis regulators discussed the
plant, in that contemporary cannabis became far more potent than that of an unspecified past.
With the changing production, cultivators favored the plant strains with shorter stature and dense
foliage, which often increased potency of the strain and bumps in THC. The plant adapted to its
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fugitive status and shifting economic geographic landscape, in a way that accrued significant
value to cultivators and informed consumers’ tastes and understandings of the plant.
Other properties have become valued over time and associated with better highs, though
these rarely actually correspond: Brian, a young grower who bounced between different sites
across the state explained that some consumers believed the purple hues of select strains,
enshrined in hip-hop lyrics about the “purp”, signaled more THC. But this coloration was not
actually a signal of anything that the market had valued. It turned out when outdoor grow
temperature fluctuated, cannabis plants would generate and a stress response, producing
anthocyanin molecules. Indoor growers then tried to duplicate the purple hue but could not
actually find a way to do that was actually improving the plant’s prospects. In fact, the purple
was just forcing it to divert energy and with it, placing it at greater risk.
The global shift to monoculture, with its extended historical ties to racial capitalist
plantation economies and colonialism, has been well-documented by political ecologists and
environmental justice activists for its perhaps unintended consequences on plant life
vulnerability to all kinds of environmental interactions (Gonzalez 2006; Hauser 2017; Shiva
1993, 2016; Tsing 2005). In this case, even smaller-scale diverse economies of indoor cultivation
meant increased and more rapid exposure to pests like spider mites and root aphids, molds, and
pathogens like root rot (or “bud rot”) that either destroyed crops or endangered human
consumers (Punja et al. 2019; Stone 2014; Whipker 2019). Risks like mold increased, as did the
need for monitoring every detail – and of course, not everyone could meet such needs and supply
an expanding market. Corners were cut; lives were put at risk.
Valeria pointed out how the presence of mold and other heavy metals directly countered
the medicinal project and put patients with sensitive immune systems at potential risks. She also
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realized how common pesticides were also affecting consumers. “You know that feeling that
people sometimes talk about: you get low price weed, and then you feel like you need to take a
warm shower. We called it cannabis itch – it’s really likely due to pesticide poisoning.”
California’s adult-use laws going into implementation when she and I were speaking meant to
eliminate widespread pesticide use, as well as test for mold, heavy metals, and a wide range of
other potential harms. Legalization had the potentials to protect individual consumers and the
plant, to truly advance the deeper medical project. Yet this process and broader economic shifts
in Los Angeles were also undermining key aspects of the plant’s fugitive circuits of value and
accelerating a commodification process that could make cannabis less of a plot onto which
BIPOC cultivators could dream and more of an intensive plantation dependent on low-wage
labor and damaging surrounding (often working class) ecosystems.
Cultivating New Politics, or, A Couple of White Guys in East LA
Doug and his partner Will, white, tall, gay men who present with certain clean-pressed,
khakis and loose t-shirt masculine swagger, do not fit the image of the average indoor cultivator,
or at least those I have met. We meet in what passes as a sidewalk café in Echo Park, a table
against a half-sidewalk on a hill surrounded by parked cars; we are not far from the County
administrative buildings where we first met. Relatively new to the cannabis advocacy world, I
had watched them hand out flyers to the crowd and organize what were also relatively nascent
public-speakers in the cannabis industry to speak, a surprisingly diverse crowd representing
unincorporated Los Angeles. They had operated a struggling outdoor cultivation facility on the
outskirts of Los Angeles County. As the project stuttered due to a lack of legal avenues for
licensing, they started an advocacy group focused on the LA Board of Supervisors, which had
for the most part opposed any cannabis activity in unincorporated Los Angeles. Their campaign
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to push for licensing catalyzed when, instead of writing regulations for the legal market, the
Board was planning a $25-million dollar policing exercise to eliminate cannabis shops and
cultivation. The funding for the raids came from a County lawsuit against Wells Fargo, tied to
the foreclosure crisis and the scamming of residents of color through mortgages. Doug, relatively
new to organizing, was a quick learner:
“I’m going into East L.A, a white guy, and I’m walking in the streets with Will and, you
know…we’re walking in the streets and going door to door and introducing ourselves with a
flyer saying they’re spending 25 million bucks to come after you guys. ‘Are you guys gonna
be a part of this or not?’ And that’s where it started blowing up.”

The two hit eighteen shops in a matter of days, finding that most of the shops, many owned
by Latinx men and women who had operated in the face of significant opposition. Their modus
operandi was taking care of daily operations, and to some degree competition “In that entire strip
of East L.A., none of the dispensaries knew each other, none of them had any communication.
None of them had any contact. They didn’t even know what each other looked like.” It turned
out, even when challenged as an outsider by some, Will had actually grown up to some degree in
the area, so he had certain credibility. But the starting point for most was a recognition of, in
Doug’s word, “a common enemy” – well, “several actually.” This included the police, anti-
cannabis neighbors, and pharmaceutical corporations.
Their common ally, of course, was cannabis as a medicine. While Will had grown up “very
conservative” in exurban Los Angeles County, and still considered himself “very Christian” for
both him and Doug “there was never even a thought for me to seek out something like that.” But
several years prior, when Will’s mother became sick with cancer, they were running out viable
options and witnessing the challenges that came with solutions like chemotherapy. They were
able, through friends, to get her access, and found themselves suddenly saying, “Okay, this is
something effective.”
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Cannabis kept creeping up into their lives: later business partners, “from church,” were also
struggling with their sons’ illness. “He had Leukemia and the do, himself is very, very just anti-
anything with cannabis and all that stuff. So, I was surprised when his father reached out, and
asked, could we find anyone that had CBD? And of course, we learned about [Cindy] and [a
cannabis women’s policy network] and what that's all about.” Cindy’s operation, in its mission
and relatively corporate set up, particularly intrigued him: “The more I have seen of them, and
you know, her employees, the more I was like, ‘Oh, this is just awesome.’”
Engaging with cannabis cracked Doug’s “very black and white” worldview and led to a
political shift: “To think that, you know, potentially, the government’s lying to someone on this
kind of level and that people have been, you know, putting a propaganda thing for years that they
never questioned themselves or it was just too much for me to kind of understand all at once.”
While at the time, what seemed like a general critique became more directed with time and
involvement in the industry politics. One of his central projects was amassing a multi-racial
coalition that could actually secure the future of outdoor cultivation. The battle was uphill, as the
visibility of cannabis – informed by the plants’ racialization and criminalization in its “natural”
form- continually loomed.
Doug’s worldview clearly began to shift when his group began hosting meetings with
grassroots racial justice groups on policing and the war on drugs, in the hopes to get the County
to not only halt the outdoor ban, but to actually reinvest in local communities. His latest
campaign, in 2018 and 2019, was trying to halt the sales of CBD in the state of California
separate from cannabis, attempting to show that this both countered scientific validity and
undermined the entire regulation process by creating a massive loophole.
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Doug’s story helps bring together an expanding market and a changing and still expansive
politics across the medical marijuana era and into the legalized adult-use. If we freeze-frame on a
certain period in the 2010s, as Peluso suggests for a conjunctural analysis of socio-natures,
medical cannabis starts to fundamentally expand in terms of both its biodiversity and market
value but also its fragility (2012). The growing commercial value and diversification has to be
understood vis-à-vis the ways policing reshaped production networks, and how the plant came to
provide a source of accessible medicine but also other highs, pleasures and relief for queer,
disabled, and communities of color under the weight of death-dealing capitalism. The fugitive
science undergirding this economy helped people understand their bodies and relationships to
plants as far more than just what could be singularly extracted for medicine or for profit. This
became increasingly important as a counter-project to the pharmaceutical industry and the ways
social and economic issues had congealed in the opioid crisis and in a lack of healthcare access
among communities of color in particular.
While not directly affected by the war on drugs and racialized violence, Doug and his
partner found themselves entangled in a fight, in many ways, to reclaim and preserve the plot, to
try to create spaces for outdoor growing and other forms of production that might not be so
constrained with risks like mold and pest outbreaks. Such a multi-vocal politics would
increasingly involve abolitionist projects like multiracial coalitions for community reinvestment
that “a white guy” like Doug could suddenly find himself surprised to help build. But any
engagement, including politically, with the “full spectrum” plant was unpredictable, and could
take you in new directions, towards new communities, and considering different futures.

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Chapter 5: Losing Ground on the Green Mile

Well, there is a real estate lobby in Albany, for example, and this lobby, which was able
to rebuild all of New York, downtown, and for money, in less than twenty years, is also
responsible for Harlem and the condition of the people there, and the condition of the
schools there, and the future of the children there. What to do? Why is it not possible to
attack the power of this lobby? Are their profits more important than the health of our
children? What to do?...None of these things (I would say) could possibly be done without
the consent, in fact, of the government, and we in Harlem know this even if some of you
profess not to know how such a hideous state of affairs came about. If some of these things
are not begun—I would say—then, of course, we will be sitting on a powder keg all
summer. Of course, the powder keg may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.

James Baldwin. “A Report from Occupied Territory.” July 11, 1966

In 1988, the world-renowned Los Angeles food critic Jonathan Gold determined to eat his
way down Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, one of the cities many multiple-mile-long
thoroughfares that bisect east and west and take you from the ocean (or at least close by) to
downtown. He selected Pico, far from recognized like its famed parallel streets Sunset, Wilshire
and Hollywood Boulevards, precisely because its “unremarked, because it is left alone like old
lawn furniture moldering away in the side yard of a suburban house” (Gold 1998). Yet he also
describes it as “the center of entry-level capitalism in central Los Angeles, and one of the most
vital food streets in the world,” which weaves together miles of the urban core with a wide range
of small retail food establishments that ostensibly represent Los Angeles’ diversity (Ibid.) I am
headed to Pico on this unremarkably sunny November day, not in search of regional Korean or
Mexican cuisine, but Will and his cannabis collective; at only 33 years of age, Will has one of
the longest standing shops in Los Angeles and active in multiple industry advocacy groups, his
stories a repository of the industry’s history.
Pico is so unremarked that it is not even accorded its own major bus line, rapid or otherwise,
meaning it takes quite a while to make it from just about anywhere. Afraid of running late for our
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interview, I emerge sweating on the street coming up Venice from the South walking briskly in
the hot sun (there are no trees around, except young , barely grown ones), and I cross through
auto repair car lots to see glimmers of Gold’s sun-soaked Pico– Caribbean restaurants, pupuseria,
a taco truck, and a cult-favorite chicken and waffles place that was a publicized campaign stop
during the 2008 elections. Following the building numbers from commercial to commercial
storefront towards my destination, I catch a glimpse of towering Black man in his 30s or 40s,
sunglasses, armed, clearly projecting security, awkwardly under a small blue umbrella. I know I
am at the right place, even though there is no signage with the business name: not even a green
cross here, the usual signifier, but a green awning. Will's store is named for a north-south street
in Los Angeles that is relatively more prestigious, but in fact sits a few blocks down from that
actual street. I learn later that it kept the name from its original location, which it left in 2011.
The building itself is a massive blue cement block with bars across multiple windows, metal
rolldown shades above dark glass, and flanked by the most precious of all Los Angeles spatial
commodities: a large private lot with another, oddly quaint security guard-umbrella stand.
While Will’s Collective may not have the expected material signifier of a green cross, plenty
abound in the surrounding blocks – on flags, flipboards, and even a surfboard in front of stark,
unicolor shop storefronts, many with darkened windows (per city regulations). I am standing in
the heart of Los Angeles’ “Green Mile,” a name that neighborhood groups and city council
members assigned to this swath of Pico as a negative moniker, to contrast it to the wealthier
“Miracle Mile” parallel on Wilshire. The Green Mile calls attention to the fact that at one point
in the early 2010s this area had nearly 3 dispensaries in every block (and at time of interview, it
still was a crowded field); shop owners did not mind the place-branding, and a few included it in
their store names.
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Local artist Ryan Mungia was so fascinated by this space he spent months photo-
documenting all the pot shops on this strip on his iPhone, gaining attention from various artistic
outlets and blogs. Per a KCET art blogger, Mungia looked to the architecture of pot shops as a
“vernacular,” like “Outsider Art” – reflecting “localized needs and readily available construction
materials” and “local traditions as well as environmental, cultural, technological, and historical
context (Dambrot 2012).” Though the art blogger does not indicate what exactly this history or
vernacular represents, Will has much to say on how the "green mile" emerges from urban Los
Angeles’ historical and spatial context as a nexus of different forms of value, including these
aesthetic contributions.
Brief aspects of Will’s accounts, subsequently detailed in this chapter, and the broader
geography of the “Green mile,” suggest perhaps Gold was right: Pico is indeed a space of “entry-
level capitalism,” not only for now-sought after ethnic foods, but also for the city’s vast cannabis
industry. But shop owners’ decisions to concentrate in this area of the city do not simply
constitute a romantic paean to the virtues of entrepreneurialism, ethnic or otherwise; nor do they
make particular sense in the case of cannabis, given the intensive competition from business
offering quite similar service. As several owners explain, this means that you can lose your
customer base quite quickly. Doing so, in fact, meant having to further drop prices, which were
already bottoming out across the industry due to competition and restructuring.
Why, then set up shop in - or for many, relocate to - areas like the “Green Mile,” or too other
cannabis “hotspots” like parts of Downtown’s Fashion District, South Los Angeles, the South
San Fernando Valley or most recently, unincorporated county regions like Whittier Boulevard in
East Los Angeles? And how did areas that would seem to attract more profit for pot – tourist-
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rich areas like Venice, or the wealthier areas of the Valley, where there is no shortage of
cannabis users, escape the presence of medical marijuana dispensaries?
The uneven geography reflects a fundamental question of land in the production and
expansion of value in cannabis. Cannabis shops were operating during the medical marijuana era
on an increasingly limited terrain of potential land, and within a broader dynamic of
skyrocketing commercial real estate made even more stark by the Great Recession. These
restructuring of racial capitalist land markets further debt-laden dynamics and radically shaped
the prospects for entry and survival during the legalization process. These processes foreground
the entwined circuits of capital that produce surplus value for landlords, real estate developers,
and police agencies while evaporating the potential for small (and fugitive) business survival and
belie simplistic entrepreneurial narratives.
Within this, policing emerges as a factor in shaping commercial land markets and police
actors as significant public-policy actors pursuing their own rents and budgets. These combine to
shift the prospects of survival for shops and contribute to many of the fugitive dynamics noted in
the last chapter, including moving to indoor grows for concealment, facilitating the exploitation
of queer, trans and women’s care labor, or needing to constantly be on the move and unsettled.
Read alongside the dynamics of racialized property reminds that any hope to retain the
possibility of the geography of the “plot” described by Black radical scholars - to hold on to land
to dream and create new possibilities - involves reckoning with the invisible architectures of debt
and everyday logics of punitive planning, from massive police budgets to the most mundane
zoning procedures, that siphon value from fugitive and grassroots economies to benefit a few.
Zoning, Debt and the Legitimacy of Property
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Magnusson points out that many accounts of the city speak of urban life as something that is
inherently self-organizing – much in the same way Hayek and other economist-philosophers who
helped foster contemporary neoliberalism imagine the market (Magnusson 2013). The kind of
“entry-level capitalism” – from street vendors to ethnic restaurants – are often imagined as part
of this tapestry that verges on the romantic, and onto which cannabis awkwardly fits itself.
But the fact is neither the city more broadly or its realities are free and self-organizing, and
cannabis’ economies came to sprout on a racial capitalist terrain where it faced not only policing,
but also an entire regime of zoning and other organization that helped shape how it took root.
Anthropologist Janet Roitman points out that economic regulation is rooted in particular political
logics: debates and protest over these often reach to questions like the “nature of property and
wealth” (Roitman 2005:11). Whose wealth is considered sanctioned and not, and what role do
state agents play in this process? Who can access land, which is so critical to wealth production
in the United States, intergenerationally but also in terms of constructing a business (Oliver and
Shapiro 2006; Taylor 2016)?
Black radical geographies point us how these questions of wealth and property are
fundamentally linked to race, only exacerbated by in crisis moments of massive restructuring.
During Los Angeles’ Great Recession and housing crash wiped out of Black and brown wealth:
by 2016, Black communities were 29.3 percentage points less likely, Mexicans 37.8 percentage
points, Vietnamese 21.4 percentage points and non-Mexican Latinxs 30.3 less likely to own
liquid assets compared to whites (De La Cruz-Viesca et al. 2016). Nationally, this corresponds to
a rapid downward slide for Black and Latinx households, which lost 75% and 50% of median
wealth respectively from 1983 to 2013, while white households gained 4% wealth (Chopra et al.
2017). Net worth has been expected to decline from there, with white households expected to
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own 99 and 75 times more wealth than Black and Latinx families by 2025, towards a long-term
bottoming to “zero” wealth not far after 2043, when the country is estimated to turn majority-
minority (Ibid.). Small business also suffered, leading to significant loss especially among Black
and migrant owned businesses in areas like Pico Boulevard – a cycle repeating itself at time of
writing during the COVID-19 crisis.
Many of the tensions and contradictions in building cannabis’ fugitive circuits of value in
the shadow of the plantation economy came from what kinds of wealth were enshrined and how
through regimes of property – enforced in the policing of space. Performing or imagining a new
economy was entangled with the intransigence of private property; as Robin Kelly notes, “land is
space, territory on which people can begin to reconstruct their lives” (2002:134). But the actual
physical space on which to dream has been even harder to come by in the context of financial
and political shifts in cities like Los Angeles enmeshed in racial capitalism.
Urban sociologists and geographers have well documented, through empirical and historical
analysis, the explosion of financialization as an underlying logic on how cities develop – driving
fundamental changes in commercial real estate (Aalbers 2019; Gotham 2006; Harvey 1989,
2005). The 1970s shift in global financial regimes and the expansion of various financial
instruments like Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) as a form of wealth accumulation
fundamentally affected how real estate works and by extension how people could afford to live
and work in the city (Fernandez and Aalbers 2016; Gotham 2006; Haila 1988). Debt financing
and other means of commercial property development remade urban landscapes and re-oriented
urban governance towards finding ways to both attract such capital and make way for
development (Hackworth 2013; Smith 1979; Weber 2002). It’s a complicated story, but it
involves a lot of creative destruction and active state and business disinvestment in certain
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neighborhoods with predominantly Black, Latinx or other non-white populations, only to then to
have capital and government re-invest in them later to make money off what’s been called the
“rent gap” (Smith 1996; Smith, Caris, and Wyly 2001).
Cannabis’ fugitive economies took root in a landscape stifled by global financialized real
estate and uneven urban development. At the same time, much attention in the literature has been
placed on elements of housing, office space, and at times hotel – and only more recently
warehouse and industrial land (Aalbers 2019; August and Walks 2018; De Lara 2018; Yrigoy
2016, 2019). Cannabis proved an opportunity to better understand retail and industrial land
practices at the everyday level, where landlords and tenants had to deal with each other in the
context of a larger hierarchy of debt extraction and financing.
Particularly relevant to cannabis, and as discussed in the introduction, these acts of
financialization and accumulation by dispossession were far from natural market events. Urban
processes of disinvestment and re-investment often involved policing inseparable from the war
on drugs. Numerous scholars document the ways that “broken windows” police ideologies as a
made to both clear the city of undesirables to make way for new, whiter and wealthier residents,
but even to police the labor that moves in those space (Camp and Heatherton 2016; Gilmore and
Gilmore 2016; Gilmore and Heatherton 2012; Mitchell et al. 2016).
35
Such policing is
empirically hard to separate from cannabis regulation, given the role that broken windows
architect and then-LAPD chief William Bratton played in the ramping up of raids in the late
2000s. His influence, I argue, extended beyond the blunt violence of raids across different city

35
And in fact, at time of completing this dissertation, this was making public discussion in sustained ways thanks to
Black Lives Matter activism that both challenged the violence of everyday policies like stop-and-frisk but have
shown how the death of victims such as Lousiville EMT Breonna Taylor in her own home was part of block-by-
block policing to make way for gentrification.
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institutions, including the City Attorney and the Planning and Land Use councils, that directed
local cannabis regulation.
Understanding the challenges cannabis businesses face takes us beyond the most visible
manifestations of police power to its influence upon everyday, somewhat mundane urban
regulation, including zoning. Blomley notes that land use planning became, especially over the
last century, an unquestioned aspect of urban theory and practice (2017). The idea of focusing on
regulating the particular uses of a space as a form of politics and place-making emerges out of
the early 20
th
Century attempts to grapple with the power of private property and the complexity
it posed to planning (Ibid). How could land uses be determined when there were private and state
interests in competition or different ideas of the public good? But more related to Robin Kelley’s
point regarding land, who has the right to dream about and on land in a landscape layered in
plantation and settler-colonial histories - how do city governments mediate these claims?
The shift to financialization and policing makes clear that for numerous recent decades, land
use and urban and municipal power over the economy rests qualitatively on “regulating space
and activities and providing services to property” (and its financiers), rather than a broader “the
public welfare” (Valverde 2012:27). Oftentimes, significant conflicts arise when what are poised
as “morally disreputable activities” are occurring on private property, and where the rights to do
so stands; in a “broken windows” world that list of un-ethical acts is extensive (Ibid; Gilmore
and Gilmore 2015; Mitchell et al. 2015). Such an ethics often translates, in now haunting words,
finding a place to sit, to stand, to breathe, or to smoke. With the advent of neoliberal austerity
that can be traced back, in particular to white-suburban anti-tax movements emanating from Los
Angeles, the ability to zone out and assign activities as unacceptable – and most importantly,
monetarily punish people for failing to comply – the more you could find new sources of
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municipal income through fine, fees, imprisonment and asset seizure and stripping (Bastien
2017; Camp and Heatherton 2016; Davis 2006; O’Malley 2009). As the previous chapters have
helped demonstrate, officials often read reputability or moral acceptance through an ever-shifting
lens that often enshrines whiteness and assigns criminality to Black, Latinx, migrant, queer and
others’ actions – and actively produces race in place and practice (Lipsitz 2007, 2011).
Across both the profound restrictions on cannabis and willingness to look the other way
noted in Chapter 4, land proves a particularly heated and often-hostile “terrain of the
conjunctural” contributing to the fragility and complexity of fugitive cannabis circuits of value.
The dynamics of global real estate accumulation, the racialized regimes of private property and
policing, and the cycle of actively-produced austerity made for shaky ground onto which one
could build new futures.
Firebombings, and Land Markets on Fire
Upon entering Will’s Collective, I was searched by Tony, the security guard, and ushered
into dimly-lit, small entry room, with a small heavy wood desk and some chairs to the side.
Behind the desk is a full wall of white-painted plywood where the magic happens behind. I asked
for Will, where confusion ensures and I set walkie-talkies abuzz. Why did I know Will, and what
did I want from him? The front-line receptionist – here an early 20s, vibrantly dressed Black
queer man - assumed that, like most here to visit the owner, I am a vendor here to present a
brand edible, or to rid myself of bags full of “flower.” The confusion hushed down when
everyone realizes Will was just running late and I was not here to solicit. (As noted by one
budtender, in the highly relational, informal supply chain meant one could expect a prospective
vendor to show up with “bags full of weed” at any time, and receptionists and security had to
always screen for these salespeople.)
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I was escorted by Eddie, Latino, in his late 20s, dressed similar to the security guard, but
with a far wider smile and affable personality. We met through the door in the plywood walls of
the front room to usher me a vast into a room that must be at least 1500 square feet. Light filters
int through large windows high up in the warehouse-like room, brick walls hold the sun and keep
the place bright, airy. As we walked, he greets each of the five budtenders – none older than 35-
and asks them if they have everything. On the right side, the large and expansive glass display
cases, full of products and sitting under Bob Marley fabric prints and tie dye. The daily board
hangs high above with the prices and information. Most of the action happens on this side of the
room, while the other half of the room is taken up by, on one, side, an empty large glass bar
across from the countertop. It was crowded with food cans (donations, I learn, for a local food
drive for the holiday season). At the far end were black leather couches where Eddie leads me to
sit and wait in the back corner next to plastic lunch table. I sat behind a fold-up screen offering
bare-bones privacy, but I could watch the slow trickle of daily sales, and see Eddie return to
check in with each of the budtenders and count a catch register – clearly, a manager, and I would
learn, Will’s right hand of many years.
Will joined me minutes later on the couches, flat converse shoes, loose black pants, a tie dye
shirt. He was in much more relaxed wear than when we first met in the halls of city council, both
of us in collared shirts and stiff attire. Despite being late, he was eager to jump in and share his
story. He described the long and complex journey to find his place on the Green Mile, from his
original shop more than a mile north, in fact in the actual “Miracle Mile” area. Though his first
years from 2007 on, as a 23- year old starting two shops, were far from easy, 2009 was a turning
point.
“In oh-nine - This shit sounds so crazy – but in oh-nine was the first time the shop got
firebombed. It sounds fucking nuts, it sounds fucking nuts. We used to have glass. There is a
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rolldown window at gate, now, but the old shop was just glass. I was installing a rolldown gate,
I knew I had to have a rolldown gate. I had already called the company – it was like a 1500
investment, and they probably had a date set.
A week or two before I am about to get this rolldown gate, it’s way past midnight, no one
is that the shop. I get a call – dude, there is a fire at the shop. There is a fire at the shop, are you
fucking kidding me?
I don’t know who did that, but I have an idea. I know who did the others ones – the
landlord did that. It sounds crazy as fuck, it sounds crazy as fuck.”

Why would a landlord firebomb his own place – not once, but nine times? Will explains,
almost dryly: “At one point, the landlord and I didn’t get along. He wanted me to leave, and I
didn’t want to leave. His response was like – ok, I’ll make you leave.” This also had other
benefits for the landowner: “Not only was he trying to evict me, but the place was old and
decrepit, and in decay. He was going to try to evict me and collect his insurance money all in one
swoop.”
Will proudly rebuilt: “I don’t want to say it was a blessing, because I would never wish that
on anyone, but we turned apples into - lemons into lemonade.” Carpet turned to tile, an “old hash
bar” got a makeover, parka became wood floors, at the costs of buying significant materials but
also closing two weeks–a large financial burden for a small but growing shop. “We waited till it
was actually nice to start letting patients back in, and we opened back up – that’s the longest that
we were actually ever closed.” The fact that this was situated during the continued expansion and
boom in the cannabis economy (still during the recession) – and that because of federal legal
status, most money was kept in cash - he had capital on hand to invest in the upgrades and
replace what he lost.
But the firebombing was only one small part of a large picture: it was matched with quite-
literally exploding rents:
“When I first started my rent was at 2200, by the end, my landlord had my rent up to 15
grand. He was also trying to get around. He was basically extorting me. He would me make
me pay him in 4 month increments – I would have to come up with 60 grand, plus 500 for
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his attorney fees. I would have to give him sixty-thousand-five hundred for a four month
period all up front, and I would come up with it.
One time – the first time day it went into effect, we got firebombed. The first time I had
to come up with it, we got firebombed. I gave him sixty grand, the next day, firebombed.”

During the period that the firebombings were occurring, Los Angeles was both an epicenter
of the Great Recession – which failed to hold down residential and commercial rents alike. This
meant that during 2009-2011, at least three-quarters of the city’s low-income residents and one
half of middle-income renters could be defined as “severely overburdened,” (Ray et al 2014).
Commercial rents have also been on the rise, albeit slower. These rents, though, could fluctuate
much more at an individual level, as industrial and other non-residential housing was unprotected
by the city's (still-meager) rent control laws.
According to NAI capital, while rents had relatively stabilized at about $2.00 a square foot
through the first five years of the 2000s, the rate slowly started to climb – and in fact hit a
relative peak in that decade – during the Great Recession. The price of office rent jumped to
about $2.75/sf in 2007 and 2008, then started to slow down $2.50/sf. By 2012-2013, rents were
on the rise again to a peak of $3.20/SF by 2018. The entered 5-county Southern California area
also hit a peak in 2018, part of an overall trend of rapid expansion of commercial and residential
development (NAI Capital 2019). (Commercial development, it’s important to note, includes
both multi-family housing and industrial, retail, office and other non-farm properties; it basically
includes anything that isn’t single family-owned and is financed usually through rental income.)
While rates were increasing, in 2003-2004, industrial rent vacancies began to decline from
nearly 5%, bottoming to 3% on the eve of 2007. In a telling interview in 2019 with CEOs of real
estate financiers and developers, one developer explained, “Those who were supremely
confident were buying up property in 2009 and 2010 and that has built momentum. Every year
has gotten better and better. We had no bad years [in commercial real estate]” (Bisnow 2019).
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Los Angeles’ commercial land markets grew in ways that seemed to evince a reshuffling of
hands – and a massive speculative boom in construction – with particular sectors, like logistics
and large-scale financiers, taking advantage of the downturn.
Retail properties were at a particular premium for operators, in part because of their quasi-
visibility; at the same time, small businesses were being rapidly eliminated in the wake of the
recession. Within the first years of the recession, business failure had jumped some 59% state-
wide, and bankruptcies became common-place (Bardhan and Walker 2010). In the years during
and following the Great Recession, banks took advantage nationwide to hold back even more on
lending to Black and Latinx-owned small businesses and to those located in low-income areas
(with several case studies documenting this in Los Angeles) (Lee, Mitchell, and Lederer 2018).
In several key concentrations, dispensaries would be the main businesses still standing for
several blocks, minus sparse auto repair shops or McDonald’s franchises. There would not be,
for example, so many cannabis businesses on Pico Boulevard if existing iterations of small
businesses had continually faced closure due to a lack of affordable options and financing. These
provide a reminder of the nature of recessions under global capitalism as moments of
restructuring of the racial and gendered order, under neoliberal financialization (and prior) often
leading to massive expropriation of value and wealth from those with the least.
When it came to retail properties which were more public-facing, value could also be
accrued through a continual process are broadly documented in terms of real estate more
broadly, not the least of which is Neil Smith’s “rent gap thesis” (Smith 1979, 1996). This idea
suggests that there is an active process of urban disinvestment in areas by market actors in order
to later re-invest and reap benefits from revitalization. Many of the areas that cannabis shops had
to move in to were experiencing that down-swing of development, places where prices were low
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enough to rent temporarily and swallow the surcharges. When one looks today, one finds that
many of the same swaths of Pico have far less cannabis shops (minus some of the more upscale,
new shops), and a new generation of hip cafés and restaurants have also come to the fore.
Cannabis offered landlords an opportunity to both fill many vacant retail spots and make
substantive rent in this downturn. As landlords became aware of the cash passing through these
shops, they would charge operators what began to be called an “insurance” fee that would send
rent sky-high. “In order to set up shop, we had to make deals with the landlords.” Athena, and
others in the medical marijuana industry into the 2010s, called this the “insurance fee”
Dispensary owners and cultivators paid landlords anywhere between $4,000 to $10,000 above
what they might charge a business in the very same strip mall or warehouse complex. She paid
the lower end of this scale because the landlord was “growing on the side.” He saw the
opportunity when she moved in to attempt to learn the trade, purchasing a large quantity of
hydroponic and cultivation equipment to set up a quick grow.
Athena learned from the business owner that he – like many other low-level commercial
landlords – was in debt and utilizing the cannabis industry to fuel his own business. Many
smaller commercial real estate owners found themselves trapped in cycles of debt tied to
financial speculation. Ownership of property, under neoliberal financialization, is a loose term.
What was also driving continued development was debt financing as a means of capital
accumulation, with individual landlords with few properties at the ground floor of that pyramid
(cf. Aalbers 2019; Byrne 2016). Debt might explain the desire to torch one’s own property in the
midst of the recession, to at the least collect insurance.
“They are in lots of debt – they want to know they are in a risk free venture. All they can
take is from what someone else is creating.” Athena calls this “listening to the greed.” The
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venture was relatively “risk-free” (as compared to the owner-operators and workers) in that
many did not face the brunt of the criminalization of cannabis. “We had to tell them – if they
come after we will move out,” Athena explained. Police raids and subsequent penalties and fines
not implicate landlords in the least, who would often feign ignorance of what was going on in the
premises. At the same time, civil asset forfeiture laws (described below) did not cover private
land in general, and thus they were not the target of seizure by the state – a reality that in
Northern California’s cannabis market had also led to heightened land speculation and complex
land titling schemes (Polson 2013).
If a dispensary was targeted in a raid, many landlords would go back and rent to another
shop fairly quickly. A prior owner would already have conducted some amount of build out that
could be re-purposed, there was an already an interested local base of clients, and demand was
high. This is not to say that some dispensary owners were not real estate owners themselves;
some were, and placed family, friends or anyone they could find who knew the business at the
head. A new generation of increasingly mobile “trap” shops ready to set up and go embodied
how the rhythms of escape and fugitivity were in fact benefitting landlords significantly, while
draining value from these small operations. While dispensaries bore the risks, debt-entangled
local landlords found a means to keep afloat in the global real estate market.
Karen-ing as Urban Governance
In 2010, city, county and state policy were also shifting, like a rapidly-moving target. Will
still had a second location in Hollywood, but quickly moved to sell it as tensions with his
landlord continued, and policy shifted:
“I sold it to a woman for 70 grand. I only got 180 of it, the lady refused to pay me for it.
I had to go into arbitration, and four years later, I got enough money to basically cover all the
money spent on arbitration – it was kind of a wash. If I had hung on to it, it probably would
have been worth 5 million dollars now, I kind of kick myself for that. But at the time, the
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reason I sold it was because the city had passed this ordinance saying you could only have
one shop, but I could have to put in someone’s else’s names, but I decided, I’ll just sell it, get
some money. And for me, that was a lot of money, I couldn’t get that money like that easily.”

Such money helped pay off another chunk of rent to his landlord, but then state policy also
changed, trickling down-scale to the city. Will explains:
“Starting in 2010, I just focused on this one place. Kept it going, kept moving.
Sometime in 2010, the state passed a law that you had to be 600 ft to a school – the state!
2011, the city of Los Angeles sued me for being too close to a school – I was 500 ft away. It
was like back, behind, way back. But it was still – there is no kids walking by. It was
bullshit.”

Licensing and zoning, in other words, were foreclosing the options cannabis retail
businesses had and forcing them to a stance of bending to landlords’ demands. As Herbert and
Browning argue, zoning is a key mechanism by which policymakers secure the space for
“private property and capital investment” by “[regulating] behavior” and “[shaping] the spatial
manifestation of urban capitalism” (2006; cf. Blomley 1994; Briffault 1990; Lipsitz 2006, 2007;
Mitchell 2001, 2003). Valverde traces this development of zoning to land use laws, and in fact
sees zoning as the “codification” of the purportedly-objective idea of nuisance (2011). She notes
– relevant to the discourse and practices surrounding cannabis in Los Angeles – that nuisance, “a
rather fuzzy category,” becomes the means to protect the privileges of particular classes of
landowners to utilize their land as they use, while denying those uses to others, particularly to
kinds of businesses deemed “risky.” Setha Lowe drills down further, explaining that zoning,
nuisance and quiet ordinances, and indirect economic strategies both ensure segregation and
enforce the definition of public space as governed by middle-class whiteness (Low 2009).
The intertwining of policing and zoning as a means to impose certain spatial relationships in
many ways reflects Kelling and Wilson’s original vision of “broken windows,” which is to move
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policing from simply being about crime but as integral to the urban “public order” (1982).
Officials’ fuzzy conceptions of order and nuisance, and these broken windows logics, do not
simply reflect racial bias but actively reproduce racial categories and a racially-exclusionary (and
settler-colonial) spatial order (cf. Dorries 2017; Dorries, Hugill, and Tomiak 2019; McElroy and
Werth 2019). Through this lens, cannabis has no space in respectable, white public spaces (like
the wealthier suburbs), even though the residents of these areas may do what they want in their
private homes and social lives.
Right before the Great Recession and the boom, Los Angeles seemed to be headed a less
restrictive direction. A 2006 working group in the city’s Planning and Land Use Management
(PLUM) committee, chaired at the time by Ed Reyes, and included Building and Safety, the City
Attorney and Americans for Safe Access, a highly active patient and owner advocacy group.
While a buffer zone for schools was part of this first legislation, so too was a licensing system
and a process for making sales. (McDonald and Pelisek 2009). But City Attorney Rocky
Delgadillo took charge of the committee in 2007 and shut the working group down. He instead
began advancing on a track that advocates such as Duncan, and cannabis reporter and researcher
John Geluardi describe, as seeking to “preclude dispensaries from operating at all in Los
Angeles” (2016). Geluardi described Delgadillo’s narrow version of an ideal dispensary, which
had less than 100 plants, operated as a cooperative, had no storefront or visible – in some ways,
an ideal example of alternative economies and the perfect plot, but one that had little grounding
in reality. All others were assumed to be fronts for organized crime - gangs in particular.
Delgadillo’s interventions into cannabis policy drew in part from the long trajectory of the
racialized war on drugs but also from his explicit subscription to “broken windows” ideologies.
36

36
In the decades prior, the City Attorney’s and the county’s District Attorney offices was appearing a
strong pathway up the city hall ladder: former major James Hahn, serving from 2001-2005, was a city attorney prior;
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Among Delgadillo’s other program were expanding gang injunctions
37
and the pro-developer LA
Daily News’ favorite- “Neighborhood Prosecutor program” (Bartholomew 2010). The latter were
installed at local police stations to aggressively pursue “drug dealing, prostitution, panhandling,
nuisance properties, street racing, graffiti, code violations and more” (Ibid.).
The City Attorney’s punitive policy stance became the foundation of city’s first official
cannabis policy, the 2007 Interim Control Ordinance (ICO). The ICO’s modus operandi was
exactly that: control. Under the ICO, no new dispensaries were allowed to form, and those who
were in existence at the point the law was passed had to produce tax certification, seller’s
permits, property leases, membership forms and other documentation of their process to remain
open (LACO 179027). In many ways, the ICO established the norm for Los Angeles which
would be to exempt certain shops from being targeted, without officially licensing them or taking
any liability for them, while still collecting taxes. The continual interventions by the City
Attorney on the cannabis rule-making process hinted at a role for police that extended directly
into policy and budget-making. Police forces and allies were not just enforcing a developers’
vision or functioning for the sake of other state agents in urban policy-making. The LAPD, here,
was an active “stakeholders” and even lobbyist for its causes. This is less a matter of police

former DA’s Gil Garcetti’s son was a city councilperson and now Los Angeles mayor. Drug war ideologies had also
played a critical role in local LA politics – in fact, Hahn won his tightly-contested bid in 2001, researchers have
noted, through continual allegations that his opponent, Antonio Villaraigosa had pardoned and was in league with a
drug dealer (Gottlieb et al. 2006). Hahn drew from and touted the important support to the Police Protective League
(PPL), as well as his proliferation of gang injunctions (Sonenshein and Pinkus 2002). (Villaraigosa would turn the
tables on Hahn and win in 2005.)
Delgadillo later found himself embroiled in a scandal regarding the improper use of city property, and other
ethics violation, including (ironically) unpaid parking tickets (Pelisek 2007). Delgadillo’s earlier ethics fines were
ultimately paid by a large Los Angeles developer, causing even more suspicion of his embroilment in LA’s elite
power structure (McGreevy 2005). Delgadillo’s rise and later fall points to a larger structural trend in which the
legal-juridical arm of the city is firmly enmeshed in its governing – and the logic of urban policies.
37
With a gang injunction place in a delimitated “safety zone”, police are able to stop people – as anthropologist
Elena Zillberg notes – to stop “all forms of association and communication between two or more [suspected] gang
members – be they standing, sitting, walking, driving, whistling or gesturing anywhere in public view” (2011)
Zillberg argues that gang injunctions contribute to a particular production of space in which certain bodies are
excluded from barrios or neighborhoods, while making individualizing “responsibility” central to policing strategies.
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simply serving the ends of gentrification, but rather this is an explicit effort to maintain their own
circuits of value and policy orientation that renders them essential to governance.
While the regulation process stuttered, Bratton’s LAPD and the City Attorney were working
hand-in-hand to shut down swaths of shops in the city’s higher-income neighborhoods. As the
ICO was being debated through lawsuits leading towards 2009, local police escalated raids in the
predominantly-white and wealthier neighborhoods of the North San Fernando Valley, under the
Devonshire police precinct. Reports suggest that the Devonshire precinct was the testing ground
for a strategy to “go after illegal clinics” (McDonald and Pelisek 2009). The operation had little
regard for whether applicants were eligible for the ICO, and by 2010, LAPD had managed to
close (according to them) every single dispensary within Devonshire’s jurisdiction. The
operation was greenlighted by City Councilmember Mitchell Englander, a reserve or “civilian”
LAPD officer whose self-described main accomplishments include as having pushed to hire over
200 additional police, all while “protecting” his region from additional development.
When any crimes did occur at a dispensary, the Los Angeles Police Department seized upon
it to assert its’ narrative that these sites were hubs of violence and risk, often tying them to
organized Black, Latino or Armenian gangs. Following a 2008 robbery of Will’s collective, in
the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles, news reports quickly claimed that the robbers were
members of the Rollin 30s Harlem Crips, a gang based in South Los Angeles that may have been
trying to “claim new territory,” even though this racialized narrative was highly contested in
court (Anon 2013). Interviewing the owner of this location, he mentioned nothing about gangs.
He describes instead how those robbing the place broke in through the back, and he was zip-tied
to the shop’s manager; in the front, the security guard and those who broke in got in an
altercation, and gunshots went off. They panicked, and ran. “This was right when the economy
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was crashing, and people were desperate at that the time.” He lamented, “They didn’t even leave
with anything. People get shot and killed over nothing.” He expressed some ambivalence at the
fact the four charged with the robbery are now being held with life without parole. News reports
I found of the incident, meanwhile, pulled out numerous transnational tropes regarding gang
violence, including calling the shooting a “execution-style” killing (Geluardi 2016; cf. Goldstein
2012). They ignored Will’s own analysis of the ways cannabis represented islands of value and
cash in an ever-more unequal Recession economy in LA, that attracted much attention from
desperate individuals and police alike.
A kind of double motion persisted for a while: every time the city seemed close to
embracing a looser interpretation of punitive cannabis law, or a standard process for permitting,
the City Attorney would enter the equation and nullify the move. Meanwhile, as the City
struggled to determine a regulatory package, the LAPD would ramp up new raids and grab new
headlines (and new commissioned research reports) about the risks of dispensaries as “magnets”
to crime.
Delgadillo’s successor, Carmen Trutanich, ran with an even more aggressive stance and
“law-and-order” politics, but in the context of the Great Recession. Jane Usher, the special
assistant Trutanich assigned to the cannabis issue, exemplified how planning and zoning become
central mechanisms of “broken windows” politics and policing. Usher in media depicted herself
as taking on the legacy of her father, a “a small-town defense lawyer who had taken a page from
Atticus Finch” in defending poor and in minorities, by trying to “protect resident’s quality of
life” (Pelisek 2010). Former Planning Commission president, she dramatically resigned from her
position in 2008 in a letter talking about the threats of over-developing transit sites, of “visual
noise” from billboards, and “stale environmental review” (Roderick 2008). Trutanich then
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selected her as his special assistant the year after, where she proclaimed her main job was to
ensure enforcement of the laws and take on “blight, tawdriness and clutter” (Pelisek 2010) – not
quite the civil rights issues described in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Jane Usher quickly became the main face of the City Attorney’s crusade against cannabis.
When interrogated by activists and the press as to why the LAPD was targeting, as noted above,
the Devonshire districts, a special assistant to Usher claimed a “complaint driven” approach
where they were pursuing “dispensaries that disturbed the neighborhood.” One interlocutor
described a closed-door hearing where Usher vowed to consider “anywhere someone is reading
to two kids a daycare, any bookclub a library, and shut them down.” She decried – much in the
vein of Kelling and Wilson’s original broken windows thesis - the city had stopped enforcing its
laws, and that it was time to enforce all of its laws unconditionally for the public order.
Usher had been referred to as the “attack dog” by several advocates, a problematic gendered
rendering. In today’s terminologies, she might be referred to as a “Karen.” But let this be a
lesson to go beyond the meme: Karens don’t operate in a vacuum. Usher’s surveillance (and
deputization of residents to complain) facilitated the broader political economy of broken
windows policing, one that not only projects an imaginary of spatial order but actively creates
the enforcement of that order and inculcates a willingness to “live in reasonably contented
subordination to that order” (Mitchell et al. 2016). Within this vision, informed but going
beyond the war on drugs, officials and media viewed the mere presence of dispensaries as a risk
to property values and to white public space, to whole (classes of) communities and of course, to
(most likely white) children. Usher’s (and today’s contemporary unpaid “Karens”) was simply
the most vocal of a racialized drug war regime whose “front” was public space.
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Which brings us back to Will’s comments about location. Cannabis operators had to become
experts in zoning and land use thanks to a special set of rules regarding location of cannabis in
relation to “sensitive uses,” first suggested by the ICO and enshrined in Proposition D (2013).
The list of such uses, thanks to the pressure of police agencies, neighborhood councils (discussed
further below), and others kept expanding: schools, daycares, churches, most related to all kinds
of moral panics associated with youth and children. The amount of feet would fluctuate (and
mostly rise) – 450, 600, 700 from different sensitive uses – and the categories would drop and
return. Keeping up was a challenge, as was knowing the precise measurements - leading to
numerous operators having to move to new locations that then charged even more rent one the
landlord figured out they were in these areas. Zoning and land use planning became a key way
to legislate the cannabis economy, and to delineate who belonged where and why. These
different tools of planning are often thought of in a neutral, technocratic lens but are in fact
value-laden ways to dictate who belongs in the city and how, fundamentally shaping the stability,
geography and ability for police and state agents to extract value from the industry (Valverde
2011; Wilson, Hutson, and Mujahid 2008).
The constant zone changes under the medical marijuana regime persisted throughout the
2010s and only offered dispensaries limited immunity – not an official license - in exchange for
compliance. When Proposition 64 passed, and the city council began drafting local regulations,
the conversation on sensitive uses only grew, a subject of debate at nearly every public hearing.
The final regulations settled upon: “700-foot radius of a School, Public Park, Public Library,
Alcoholism or Drug Abuse Recovery or Treatment Facility, Day Care Center, and Permanent
Supportive Housing, and any other licensed storefront retailer” for shops, with slightly less for
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manufacturers, cultivators or labs.
38
There was an entire public forum meeting on draft
regulations that involved discussion about where the (then 600 feet) to sensitive uses was “as the
crow flies,” or from what edge of the property. As mundane as it seemed – and felt – it was
critical to any cannabis dispensary’s prospects, and ultimately crystallized a particular order that
enshrined while profiting mostly landlords and police institutions.
Accumulation By Blunt Dispossession
What police, the City Attorney and press called a “whack-a-mole” of raids was a lucrative
business for local police in other ways, thanks in part to civil asset forfeiture laws. Police would
burst into the shop, take thousands or millions in cash and cannabis, and close it down. A version
of the shop managed by the same people or their associates would sprout up some blocks away
(sometimes a neighborhood or two away). These laws giving police the right to seize any sort of
cash and other assets suspected to be involved in a designated crime have been well documented
over several decades as providing a massive supplement to police budgets (Holcomb, Kovandzic,
and Williams 2011; Worrall 2001). In cannabis, Polson documents how in Northern California
cultivators were often offered a chance to trade prosecution for not contesting seizure of goods
(2013).
Union leaders recall how some of the first and more frequently hit were the larger
dispensaries with wider customer bases – some so, multiple times, including a major shop that
bounced between West Hollywood and Venice. This is not because these were somehow
operating in illicit ways: many of these included shops that had tried to follow every new rule
that was being put out. Mariana described how even in her shop, which was compliant to

38
At one point, this included youth development centers, but it turned out there was no set definition of what that
meant, so that dropped. Ironically, youth organizers were advocating being rebuffed in their attempts to gain funding
for a citywide youth development office; organized abandonment made it harder, in other words, to find reasons to
police space and enact organized violence at times.
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Proposition D, police came in after a sting operation, where they interrogated customers until
found that one “patient” was not carrying her medical cannabis recommendation. They barreled
in, sequestered the staff, and seized hundreds of thousands in cash and cannabis products. It did
not matter that the actual owner-operators were often not on site, and budtenders and front-line
workers ended up bearing the arrest and record, with business owners paying bail (another boon
to the city). Nadia explained how in her “illegal” South Gate shop, the police did not even bother
making arrests or shutting down the shop: they came in armed, confiscated the goods and left
with all the cash in the dispensary. In public reporting on the Devonshire raids, police were
more than happy to report the amounts of cash they brought in, including one from a dispensary
supposedly making $8-10,000 a day, another with $48,802 cash from a single day, and even one
grow house with “a small fortune in gold ingots and gold and silver bullion” (McDonald and
Pelisek 2009). Police piracy, at its finest.
If a robbery occurred, dispensary owners rarely called the police. In the few instances I did
hear of owners doing so to be able to make an insurance claim, those interviewed said their first
move was to make sure that any cash in the location is swept off-site, knowing that this may
disappear during the police investigation.
Police took advantage of continually changing local regulations and the contradictions of
federal illegality to act in ways that were opaque - though the patterns often reflected a desire for
maximizing assets. The more the ambiguity regarding cannabis persisted, the more police
maintained access to federal grants and partnerships with federal agencies that included
militarized equipment, part of the longer arc of the war on drugs since the 1980s (Murch 2015).
The more that public discourses linked “illicit” dispensaries to transnational gangs (and by
extension, in the post 9/11 imaginary, terrorism), the more that they could also seize upon
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numerous Department of Homeland Security grants (Romero 2011; Romero et al. 2018; cf.
Müller 2020; Waxman 2009).
These more recognized incentives for police budgets were also matched by less-visible but
equally lucrative money-making in terms of an economy of cash bail, fines, fees and lawsuits.
Policy researchers and community organizing groups have noted the uptick of these groups
providing revenue for police institutions and for cash-strapped municipalities, even as such
budgets have been restricted by anti-tax regimes and neoliberal austerity (Asset Funders Network
2017; Bastien 2017; O’Malley 2009). As part of enforcement, the city sued Will for “like $2
million and they wanted me to never be able to operate again,” he described. “Anyway, I got the
right attorneys, we settled for $25,000 and that we could not operate at [specified address]. We
agreed, and started moving in 2011.” Numerous budtenders who were arrested in raids were
charged exorbitant bails, that owner-operators at times helped cover. Broken windows had a
political economy that went beyond a second-hand association to capital; policing, I argue,
steered value from the fugitive economy to their benefits, and protected these circuits of capital
through its lobbying and political jockeying.
Given LAPD’s racialized application of broken windows’ and their well-established racial
patterns in cannabis arrests at an individual possession level, it wouldn’t be hard to assume that
the same applied to who was hit with raids and who was prosecuted for violations (Bryan et al.
2019; Chang and Poston 2019; Provine 2008) . One medical marijuana patient at a 2016 planning
hearing claimed that numerous “legal shops have been shut down because of what I call
marijuana Nazis who go around filing complaints, just because they don’t like you whether
because of your race, or that you are young.” While the patient’s claims have a dramatic flair,
she does speak to the racialized way complaints are produced, policed and further prosecuted.
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The language about who was running supposedly-illicit shops was barely-veiled racist narratives
about Black, Latinx and Armenian gangs, so too was the sweeping raids in places like North San
Fernando Valley that drew a clear line between where dispensaries could be based on a
racialized geography. In the discussion of the raids in the North Valley’s wealth suburbs, one
police officer noted: “[The dispensary owners] call us every name in the book, but the bottom
line is, don’t open a store north of Roscoe Boulevard” – the dividing line between Van Nuys and
Sherman Oaks and Northridge and Reseda. Reseda [if one recalls the Karate Kid (1984)] and
Van Nuys are both more working poor and brown, compared to Northridge and Sherman Oaks,
and the cities are quite literally divided by tracks.
Post-raid sentencing also repeated the racialized disparities of the broader war on drugs.
Owners Arik and Mike, both who had complaints filed against them but were never prosecuted,
admit race and social status may play a factor. Mike tells me his lack of a conviction may be
“because I’m a young white guy, and may have been different if I was Black.” Arik also
mentions that he has connections through public servants in his family to local judges, part of a
local civil service connections among Armenians in the area. Mostly-BIPOC budtenders, too,
lingered in jail. Several interviewees like Nadia, in her mid-20s, Latinx and fiercely punk, asked
for any help I, the union or other organizations could offer to help get out several young Afro-
Latinx and Latinx friends from other shops who were lingering in the jail system after a recent
swath of raids. “Their bosses disappeared on them, and no one has paid their bail,” she lamented.
Of multiple dispensary owners I interviewed, Clarence, a 49-year old Black resident of South
Central was both one of the few public, pre-ICO dispensary owners of color and one of the few
to spend considerable jail time from what started with a “complaint.” He was particularly
frustrated because a rival owner took over the shop, first claiming to hold on to the ICO
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agreement for him while Clarence was in prison, and then stealing the shop from under him –
petty accumulation by dispossession aided by police violence.
Police also turned into a desperate weapon by some operators to help cope with the steep
costs of survival. After his arrest, Valley dispensary owner Arik also received a letter from the
City Attorney demanding he close his doors in 2013, after Proposition D. As one of the few
shops securely on the Prop. D immunity list, he was surprised and called the City Attorney’s
office furious. “Then I come to find out the illegal store across the street from me called to say
that I was an illegal store, and I say, that’s your due diligence? What if I called to say there is an
illegal liquor store, you are gonna go raid them?” In a cutthroat market where survival was
constantly challenged, not the least because of the possibility of losing the ground from under
you, the complaint system also became a weapon among different actors. Some owners were
more than willing to use the same instruments that would be used against them to extract their
value. Accusations of who was illegal and who was deserving of inclusion mounted as many
started to see the industry as zero-sum and holding exclusive neighborhood territory to retain
customers key to survival. Of course, police were not interested in engaging in checking these
claims, as a raid was a raid, and it was usually the most successful businesses in the crosshairs.
A racialized order of fines, fees, bail, and a violent enforcement of an ever-changing set of
rules – a war on drugs in another name - quite literally enshrined fugitivity in operations across
the supply chain. This kind of order made it even harder, according to numerous shop owners to
survive even if you played by the ever-changing regulations, much less to hang on to an
affordable plot of land. You were still as likely to get raided, you could be targeted at any
moment, and you had to pay taxes on top of it. Ironically, the LAPD was creating exactly the
kind of market that it had claimed to want to stop – one of temporary shops that needed to move
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volume quickly, that might be disconnected from medical marijuana in many ways, and would
barely invest in more than, in one pre-ICO owners’ words, “slapping some paint up and putting
out a cheap glass case until the next raid took it away again.”
There Goes the Neighborhood
Raids hit San Pedro in various waves; one cannabis shop next to a strip-mall “gourmet
burger” shop, with a “ILWU Proud” sign hanging, was hit in 2016. A young Latino worker was
brought out as press cameras went off. They had barely set up shop, with most of the cannabis in
bags and a bare storefront set up. “That’s how you end up with blight; people set up shops that
look ugly. They don’t care about it our invest in it,” Tom lamented. But, “I understand it,” he
cautioned. The raids had created the need to keep the storefronts mobile. Ironically, it was
precisely the policing that was incentivizing the “broken windows” aesthetic. The policing had
also concentrated the shops, per Tom, “in the barrio. It’s telling: cheap rent, empty storefronts, it
makes sense.”
Tom was a cultivator for many years, first learning the trade when in college in the Green
Triangle area, and later participating in small cooperative cultivation operation. He envisioned
the possibilities of change as Proposition 64 kicked off and decided to take on these dynamics
through a growing cannabis advocacy network focused on post-legalization regulation. In
particular, he was hoping to break the cycle of raids that kept plaguing local outlets, while
envisioning creating a cultivation hub in the area for small cooperative businesses under the
watch of the city (more green dreams of a plot). One day down the line, he hoped, cruise ships
would dock in San Pedro, tour a cannabis business district and meet local growers, including
young people of color from his community.
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A letter from Council President Herb Wesson asking neighborhood councils for guidance
signaled a chance to actually influence the conversation. He reached out to three of the local
neighborhood councils, and found the one most entangled in the raid situation ready to hold a
conversation. From there, he hosted a town hall where more than 100 people showed up,
including local council staffers.
Tom had a sense of the relational and intimate level of politics in San Pedro, having known
the City Councilperson Joe Buscaino from personal contacts (and high school friends), who was
“personally” anti-cannabis. During the height of the raids, the Councilperson’s Communication
Director noted that the stance was “not about being pro- or anti-marijuana,” he said. “It’s
enforcing [Proposition D, the law] that voters voted in” (Littlejohn 2016). Local newspaper
Random Lengths often published critiques of Buscaino that charged him with “a nice guy, a
former Los Angeles Police Department senior lead officer whom everybody once liked” that as
such “views governance through the lens of law enforcement… His leadership, much like his
police training, is a top down kind of approach that distrusts collaboration, public discussion
(unless heavily controlled or edited) and critique” (Allen 2016). Buscaino was not the only one –
there were other former police on City Council like Englander. His approach, thus, was not
simply a matter of individual sentiment, as much as reflective of a way of governance that
filtered across the council and county and relied upon a logic of policing.
As regulations shifted from 2010 towards 2016, a few larger advocacy groups like
California NORML or Americans for Safe Access were struggling to gain a foothold in
policymaking. More direct action like the die-ins against raids were moving the dial, but this was
more anarchic and fleeting (quite literally integrated into Occupy and other anarchist groups).
The strength of the broken windows police apparatus was not faltering as Los Angeles under
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Bratton’s aggressive approach. New actors like the UFCW were having better success in
cracking this hegemony, given their larger role within city politics, as detailed in Chapter 2.
Learning from the changing politics, cannabis operators were willing to come out like Tom were
also realizing that a wholly “outside” strategy sans a real mass base was not getting much, nor
was an attempt to use individual lawyers and counter-suits. Increasingly, owner-operators were
also striking another even more local level of politics.
Arik describes, “When the raids kept happening, we were all calling each other – and
saying, hey are we gonna let lobbyists and lawyers dictate to us what direction we are going to
go in, or are we going to dictate to them what direction we are going in?” He describes the
realization that settled among them that “the city attorney was running the city council” – that the
police vision was firmly entangled in governance. Arik was one of the first to call the union into
the conversation with operators and workers during the full-scale 2013 ban, and saw this as a
turning point in the political conversation, through a foot both in the door and a mass base (in
this case, tied to UFCW’s massive cross-sectoral workforce and mostly-BIPOC community
allies) ready to protest outside the halls of power.
Some cannabis activists and operators looked even more local to an often-ignored venue –
neighborhood councils. The real weight of these organizations, which were supposed to have
created more local democracy, was around zoning and land use planning. Given how much the
racialized logic of policing and cannabis practice bore out through these planning mechanisms,
which created an unexpected opening.
Neighborhood council-level debates started to make visible a geography that had long taken
root across the various warehouses in downtown San Pedro, alongside the storefronts. Tom
found of the surprising allies at public forums were other frustrated small businesses, who were
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also beholden to zoning that favored commercial real estate needs. Tom shared: “Just talking to
them - and a lot of restaurant owners…you know they're just like, ‘Man, I get it.’ They know
after like having a business for like 30 years, 40 years, they’re going to sell out to the big
business. Because they can't compete, you know with big business, with real estate.”
Eddie, the head of a neighborhood council adjacent to downtown quipped that cannabis
finally “gave a real role for neighborhood councils.” That role, he said, was messy, at the
intersection of public safety, land use and governance liaison – and still informal in many
respects. We had an awkwardly long conversation on a very long train ride home to Echo Park
from a public forum in the Valley area, another cluster of neighborhood council. His area formed
the intersection of several communities, including historic Filipinotown and an area adjacent to
the infamous Rampart police station, which had been the center of a massive campaign of police
corruption in the early 2000s.
Eddie had gone to make sure his letter calling for a tempered approach to cannabis was
heard. He noted that there was one “good operator” in his neighborhood who, like Tom, began to
attend the neighborhood council meetings in an attempt to show he was “above board.” But the
other council members reacted with ire. “I think they were jealous: here was a small business
that was finally thriving.”
The previous iteration of Eddie’s neighborhood council leadership worked with their city
councilperson to also target shops in the neighborhood, and took a hard stance against the small
number of warehouse cultivators in the area. Eddie ran against the prior slate as he was tired of
their punitive politics, and he was happy to host more cannabis shops or cultivators. Most were
along a few strips of streets where most businesses, including auto parts, small medical supply
shops, and other small business did not hold fast. He laughed as he noted, “I only wish growers
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could get rid of that smell because then no one would even know they were there.” His wish was
for more time to “research, and to educate” – particularly towards local Filipinx community
members who were as resistant as some white home and property owners, for many complex
reasons tied to stigmas from the globalized war on drugs. He sighed: “Somehow we have
succeeded in getting rid of almost every shop and cultivation facility, but we don’t know why,
and I don’t think that’s a good thing.”
As the experience in Historic Filipinotown showed, city councilpeople were also mobilizing
neighborhood councils to push forward a prohibition agenda starting in 2010. During the 2012
ban, Jose Huizar and Englander paraded out self-described neighborhood council members from
Huizar’s district, including a mother with a stroller and another parent who claimed her children
had to walk through “puffs of smoke” to get to school. Both city councilmembers had positions
in PLUM but recognized the critical role the most local councils could play in moving the zoning
conversation towards prohibition (which also further empowered Jane Usher and later, City
Attorney Mike Feuer).
Even as the regulation process shifted post-Prop 64 from debating bans to discussing the
shape of regulation, several neighborhood councils attended meetings and submitted a flurry of
letters to enter into the record only to ask to have dispensaries excluded from their areas. The
Skid Row Central City Neighborhood Council, which originally did not have representation from
any actual Skid Row residents but many more Central City businesses, blankly spoke out at a
2017 hearing: “We have heard from our Skid Row Central city stakeholders: they do not want
those businesses within the boundaries.” Downtown was one area where the zoning requirements
actually offered a chance to open a shop, given the lessened concentration of schools and
churches, but it was also a prime target in Bratton’s broken windows regime.
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Some of the more vocal neighborhood councils were not just wealthy areas, or areas in the
midst of gentrification. Barton Hill in San Pedro was a predominantly low-income area, the
“barrio” that Tom had referred to earlier. A Northeast LA Latinx working class communities’
neighborhood council was active in calling for the 2012 ban; several South Central and Pico-area
Black communities also spoke out when the first public forums about the new adult-use
regulations occurred. The desire to keep cannabis out, in other words, was not just among
wealthy suburbanites. It was also a preoccupation and fear among working class communities.
These resurrected a similar struggle regarding liquor store licensing that had become a locus of
community struggle in the 1990s (Murch 2015; Park 2004; Sonenshein 1996).
What’s critical here is the ways the counterpoint to cannabis worker and operators’ narrative
on patients and medicine, to strategies like the UFCW’s white coats and the testimonies of
terminally ill patients described in Chapter 2, turned the politics of fugitive care and science into
a story about place and what belonged in the city. They offered a counter-geography to
dispensaries as broken windows magnets of crime and dangers to children – instead one
connecting people across lines of difference towards healing, and increasingly, economic
development. To break the hold of this urban political economy, or at least to survive its
turbulence, cannabis advocates and owners like Tom went immersed themselves “inside” the
bureaucracy of neighborhood politics to gain another edge on a process. To the credit of the
neighborhood councils, some found that direct organizing in these spaces could actually shift an
entire council, especially after Proposition 64.
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39
In part, this had been modeled by the extensive public engagement by the new Reform CA coalition led by more
community racial justice organizations that wrote Proposition 64, noted in the introduction. It coulda also attributed
to a shifting consensus on public engagement as a means to build equity into processes in the city of Los Angeles,
one that requires further exploration in research (See Carter, Pastor, and Wander 2018).
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For Tom, the ability to move neighborhood councils came down to the fact that explained
the real opposition in most local spaces came from a (very) vocal minority. “Of all the people
there, only 1 person was concerned with legalization and youth exposure in particular.” Tom
would also frequently introduce himself as a father of two, whenever he would step to the
microphone in public forums. In this exchange, he countered, as he often did that, “Street dealers
don’t check IDs – shops do.” He explained to the nay-sayer that regulation was actually a more
effective ways to curb youth usage, which seemed to quell the conversation. He returned to his
vision of a cannabis cottage industry giving his neighborhood a new future, and shifted the
discourse to the promise of economic renewal that talk of manufacturing engendered.
40

Tom ended up creating and running a task force for the neighborhood council to be able to
move the conversation away from prohibition, with some success; they soon became one of the
more regular advocates at meetings, submitting regular letters asking for a less restrictive policy.
At least four other owner-operators I spoke to also ran for and joined the neighborhood council,
which, in the words of one North Hollywood shop owners, “to pay our dues and have people
understand we are here to stay.” Like the work to invest locally in community organizations or
services, and actively pay taxes, the impulse among some was to further tighten relations locally
and invest in a model counter to modes of neoliberal governance rooted in austerity – and to
provide a counterweight to the power of police in shaping policy.

40
While this was, as one budtender described in Chapter 4, a “post-Gupta” world, across the city attorney,
neighborhood councils, and resident-advocates, a go-to ideology persisted: dispensaries were a danger to children.
Even after the passage of Proposition 64, a coalition called “Rethinking Access to Marijuana” would come armed to
the city hearings with folders full of statistics about cannabis and its effect on youth. I recorded at least four council
hearings where the phrase, “Think of the children” was utilized. In a 2017 hearing, one nonprofit staff from a
behavioral health group the coalition laid out the spatial logic: “Be mindful of our children: Please think of where
they go to school, how many walk to and from school, where they live where, they play..and how with increased
availability there is increased access of youth.”
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Arik, who was a vertically-integrated, also contributed significant funds beyond his taxes
(through Proposition D) to local community organizations. This was common practice, even
among cultivators. While one could read this cynically as an attempt to curry neighborhood favor
as part of lobbying, Athena viewed this as part of a longer tradition among cultivators (that
retailers also adapted):
“It’s the same thing that they did up in Humboldt when they started putting up the first
pot farms and they started having people come in and what could they do? They weren't
allowed to pay taxes so what did they do? They built communities. They donated to the
schools. They took and fed the community. They started building and they started paying the
people that are working there. And the same thing that happens in the Valley and the same
thing that happened everywhere. It's those farmers that are paying those government
employees and helping sustain communities.”

Beyond donating to food banks, community organizations, and even small organizing
groups, many also paid taxes even if they were not licensed. In addition to the extractive policing
noted above, in Los Angeles, a strange loophole emerged in 2011 where the Office of Finance
would issue “L050” special cannabis tax certificates to anyone who requested. At one point near
2016, there were more than 500 such business paying taxes, and only 135 authorized shops. The
city feigned an ability to control this, and for cannabis business owners, it was part of a way to
hold on to legitimacy. In many ways, their actions ran counter to a post-Fordist, neoliberal legacy
of choking the state of funds, and suggested that these owners viewed themselves as embedded
in the city’s future. Many operators, in discussion before 2018, were more concerned with
making sure all their competitors paid taxes, versus eliminating taxes.
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41
This did change after 2018, when grumblings of taxes started to mount, especially in addition to licensing fees and
to the costs of build out. Tax frustrations were compounded by the fact many still also paid federal taxes, and did so
with unable to deduct most business expenses due to Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code, a law that had
(purportedly) been designed in the 1980s to go after cocaine traffickers (Vujcic 2016)
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Interestingly, one owner in North Hollywood described how after participating in the
council, he eventually met a real estate developer willing to rent him space. “One woman
introduced me to a really good realtor that’s from the area that doesn't really deal with
dispensaries, but because I’m active in the community they felt good about it.” Even so, “it was
a tremendous challenge to get them to sign the lease,” and he had to adjust the amount he was
paying. The relationships among cannabis owners and the broader development agenda might be
getting closer, but they would still be beholden to extraction. They were barely “inside” the door
– but they were getting closer to certain forms of power.
Re-Zoning Cannabis (to Save the City)
Part of the “inside” politics that Tom was advancing in neighborhood councils, as well as
the small city boards and councils in the Southeast region of Los Angeles, was most successful
in selling a vision of economic renewal for faltering manufacturing regions and empty
commercial real estate. Several anti-cannabis councilpeople lobbied by both neighborhood
councilmembers and emerging coalitions in Planning and Land Use meetings (PLUM) to show
more leniency towards production. In 2016, as Proposition 64 was just passed, an exchange in
LA’s City Council hearings revealed the ways the economic development conversation was
gaining traction inside and outside. The council invited a larger vertically-integrated dispensary,
and discussed with him particular possibilities. The less-than-cannabis friendly councilperson
posed:
“I would like to hopefully get everybody to kind of look at the future and what the --
this is an opportunity to really revitalize a lot of our manufacturing industrial zones. This is
really a segment where we hope that if it's done right we can dominate the entire state. --
ultimately I think it can be good for L.A. workers.”

The councilperson was willing to even remake the zoning distances from “sensitive
uses” for these facilities and shift zoning restrictions. “Not sure day cares matter here -- there is
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no harm. A baby isn't going to crawl in [to these facilities].” Whether a baby would crawl into a
dispensary remains to be seen, but the fact was that organizing on an axis of promoting economic
revitalization through production helped bring otherwise-intransigent actors to the table.
As legalization set in after 2016, many owner-operators, advocates and even councilpeople
raised the explicit promise this production offered particularly Black and Latinx communities
(which to some extent, if you looked at the actual workforce and where the knowledge of
cultivation was contained, was not just speculative.) Adam, an aide to one of the more active
councilpeople in shaping post-legalization regulation explained the vision to me, first explaining
that “this is the one industry that's come along in the last 50 years that can truly revitalize the
industrial corridors of the city.” Adam confirmed that besides small machine production and
“adult film manufacturing”, manufacturing was slow in the Valley and needed cannabis.
Adam linked the San Fernando Valley’s collapse to crises in Black and Latinx communities
starting in the 1980s. “When the tire manufacturing plants and the car manufacturing plants all
left in the late 60s or 70s, it's really what led to the creation of the – first the Crips and then the
Bloods and that led to the gang issues and unemployment and poverty issues in South L.A.” As
Dr. Hope also mentioned, Black workers were often erased from the narrative of the Valley, but
also held union jobs there [as did Latinx workers, after much organizing to gain access to these
jobs, see (Mann 1986)]. Adam was unconvinced retail would offer much in the terms of pay, but
the average wage in industrial cultivation and manufacturing – starting at $20 an hour – and the
potential for unionization might shift conditions in a historical way:
“If you're able to create, you know, tens of thousands of those jobs, not only are you getting
people from the community a job, but it's really revitalizing those areas and can really be an
economic engine to the city. And so, I think that's equally as important as, you know, any
revenue with the city you get.”

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In his mid-30s and an Armenian who had grown up in both the Little Armenia and multi-
racial Glendale enclaves, “back in the days of the race riots,” he too envisioned a chance to both
bring above-board many of the people, particularly other people of color, he worked with and
also create new opportunity to what he described as whole generations of immigrants who had
no savings. “It’s a chance to help our own local Angelenos and Californians find a good, living
wage. And maybe now we can buy a house since we have real income we don’t have to hide.”
Clarence had teamed up with a former hip hop music-industry executive Marvin to run one
of the most vocal social equity advocacy groups. Much of their pitch and lobbying often
resurrected a Fordist-era dream of large scale, unionized manufacturing:
“Marvin: You don’t need a degree to do this job. These are blue collar jobs - This
kind of takes you back to the industrial days of LA – back when the car manufacturers
were right here in town. You could go and work there for 35 an hour, Lockheed, all the
other tech, aerospace companies. But we lost all that.
Clarence: That’s right, but they shipped them out
Marvin: True, you had Lockheed,
Clarence: Yep, they shipped them out. We were near Northrop Grummond; we had
one more too, I can’t remember – and they were all South Bay. You had aerospace and
military production, all of those were paying great money. I had a lot of my family
working in these.
Marvin: That’s right, not the degree kind of jobs.
Clarence: Absolutely not, blue collar jobs
Marvin: You could make 35, 40 dollars.
Clarence: Damn good money.”

The aforementioned accounts describe the ways in which Black residents of South Los
Angeles and cities like Compton and Inglewood suffered from manufacturing decline across
forty years. Capital flight for lucrative incentives elsewhere hit Black and Latinx communities
the hardest; now these abandoned sites offered the opportunity to install a new, or rather re-
ignited, industrial geography that could remake the city by infusing both wages and taxes after
neoliberal austerity. But there were many questions on how such a geography fit into a city that
was now being driven so heavily by real estate speculation and development finance.
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Some small cities were quick to try to position themselves for larger cannabis manufacturing
post Prop-64. Jamila, a planner and attorney working for a small Southeast city, found herself
active in the cannabis space. Rather than license or simply zone cannabis, she explained, “cities
wanted to do more of a development agreement.” Development agreements are like a land-use
agreement but they are a specific contract between a set of parties. They involve a lot more
scrutiny, and according to the traditional planning literature, but Jamila saw something else at
work: “With a development agreement, you capture a fee structure without having to do a tax.”
The goal, in part, was trying to deal with cash-strapped cities who would find selective ways to
permit cannabis businesses. Going this route also meant one did not have to go to the voters to
revisit the contentious issues of cannabis use. It meant tapping into the promise of cannabis not
just for manufacturing jobs or other speculative ends, but to fill real and growing material holes
in small-city budgets. These same city budgets relied, some years prior, on policing as well -
with numerous community organizations demonstrating that policies like checkpoints targeting
unlicensed drivers were simply schemes to expand city budgets at the expense of working
class/poor undocumented residents (Pastor, De Lara, and Rosner 2016; Watson 2011).
Cannabis, as legalization loomed, offered new kinds of industrial specialization that would
also fuel its own real estate development booms and boons to city coffers starved by
neoliberalism. Their models, and Marvin and Clarence’s recounting, hearkened back to 1950s
and 1960s US Fordism, where the dream of a family wage in a union, manufacturing job was
believed to boost consumption and lead to a virtuous cycle of middle class consumption (Harvey
1989; Soja 1989). But in the age of financialized real estate speculation and in a system
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structured by neoliberal governance
42
, that dream was perhaps more ephemeral – especially
considering that Fordism involved a “Big Government” that was increasingly chopped down to
subcontracted parts. In this case, the hope was for cannabis manufacturing to both fuel job
creation and infuse cash into municipal economies starved by austerity would prove harder than
it looked, especially when real estate prices were so high.
But that did not stop speculation on manufacturing and cultivation real estate from
spreading. Small cities like Desert Hot Spring, along with several others such as Adelanto, had
become a cultivation hotbed over the last year. Huge warehouses that could outmatch those built
for Walmart and Amazon goods just down the road were sprouting fast. But water and electricity
were not following suit. Some sites picked by cultivators I met were at times too far off the path
of the electrical and water grid to actually include utilities that could meet their demands,
requiring expensive infrastructure projects. One company even planned to build a full concrete
plant to meet demand for building materials in the rural area.
In the high desert in 2018 and 2019, entire geographies of pre-fabricated and prepared
cultivation spaces rose up out of nowhere in places like California City. But many of those
buildings started to stay half-filled or even empty as the infrastructural needs to maintain
cultivation at that scale were barely present, and the realities of local and state licensing far more
complex. “They didn’t even bother checking if they had water out there,” Janet, a vocal cannabis
attorney and social equity advocate, lamented. “The [real estate and land brokers] just took
people’s life savings.” It could be sure, though, that real estate speculators, if not cities looking
for initial licensing fees, were cashing in regardless of who survived.

42
Neoliberalism refers an ethical and political stance that proffers subsuming all public and private activity under
market logics, privatizing state services, and removing all barriers to market actors will lead to the ideal social ends
(Harvey 2009, di Leonardo 2008, Brown 2015).
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Leading into the post-Prop 64 era, Athena explains that even though money was changing
hands fast and cash was plentiful, holding on to your small plot and even more so, claiming land
ownership felt impossible for even long-term non-white participants in the industry. The cycles
of policing and real estate speculation – were echoing even more historical relationships of
alienation under racial capitalism. Many cultivators were having to cut less and less favorable
deals with landlords to stay in a shared area; dispensaries were still paying exorbitant prices to
start legal operations on maps that were smaller and smaller by the day. It was still hard to avoid
the siphoning of value by the punitive state and petty and large private property owners. Despite
the maneuvering inside and outside of the halls of power, or promising programs like social
equity I will discuss in the next Chapter, there were deeply unequal, highly policed spatial
relations embedded in Los Angeles’ plantation geography that proved hard to overcome. Athena
put it succinctly. “Now you could get lucky, come into a place [to grow or sell] - but the
landlords are coming in on it too, scraping off this and that – and you’re doing the real work.
Kind of like that sharecropping.”

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Chapter 6: Reparations, Reinvestment and the Rush of Global Capital

Negotiating equity positions you'll never be
Rap sheet full of felonies
Status symbol on my set of keys
They say I was selling dreams
Back to the brick wall I'm inhaling trees
Visualizing hella cheese, you can smell the weed..
Fuel to the fire took it higher than they ever see
- Nipsey Hussle, Status Symbol (Featuring LilCadiPGE and Buddy)

The UFCW Local 770 organizer exiting the dispensary, was quick enough, and as he joked,
short enough to duck the bottle of Gatorade thrown at him. Flaring tensions were an
underestimate. The protestors, with signs bearing “No to LA Cannabis CO” and “Save
Crenshaw,” were only about 20 to 30 in number on a warm October afternoon in 2018, but their
energy was palpable. Located at the tip of Leimert Park, a historically middle-class Black
neighborhood, the shop had become the target of a new campaign asserting that the area’s newest
dispensary was standing in the way of any new Black-owned cannabis shops emerging. Decked
in a bright yellow union shirt, the organizer had been charged by the crowd with complicity in
the displacement, as were Black, Latinx and API budtenders at shop. At times, the crowd and
workers clashed, and accusations flew on all sides about who was gang or organized crime
affiliated. The organizer, in his late 20s, born and raised in California’s working class
communities, did not begrudge the launched bottle: “I get it, I know why people are pissed.”
The contention was complex, but in the press it made for a few good headlines that October
2018. At the lead of the protest, Tonya, a long-time entrepreneur and active resident of Leimert
Park’s business community, who had been waiting since the launch of official cannabis retail
licensing in January to start a business under the City’s new Social Equity Program (SEP). The
program had a slow and tortured start, in part because it was the first-of-its-kind policy
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experiment and had significant ambitions, and in another because the new Department of
Cannabis Regulation was underfunded towards its multiple mandates, that included having to
license the first cultivation and manufacturing facilities (some of whom were also social equity
businesses).
Tonya was blunt in her assertions to the press: “They have a history of taking the wealth that
they’ve gained over the passing years and taking it out of the community,” she said. “They have
not reinvested.” Tonya’s “they” referred to an Armenian business owner and to Armenian
cannabis business operators in general; her words held significant parallels as a to the kinds of
tense protests of Korean-owned liquor stores in predominantly Black neighborhoods in the wake
of the 1992 uprising (Park 2004; Sonenshein 1996). Her effort was much smaller, more focused
endeavor than the community campaign that had emerged in post-uprising South Central, but she
still drew distinct racialized and geographic lines around these historically-black neighborhoods
and claims around non-Black minority entrepreneurs siphoning community resources. The owner
of the unionized dispensary had three other shops, two of whom were in South Central, a point
that protestors underscored.
This chapter takes us to one year and more into the launch of the regulated market in Los
Angeles in 2018 and 2019, where transformations in the dynamics regarding labor, commodity
and land – and tensions centered on these arenas deepened. Cannabis was still on the up and up,
and policy presentations, pitch decks, and public media were filled with bar graphs showing the
value of the legal market increasing to 40 and 50 billion by 2021 and 2022, or anywhere from
$150 to $500 billion a decade later (Speights 2018). Nearly a year into the legal market launch,
thousands of non-regulated shops persisted, and new regulated brands were popping up every
day. Areas on the outskirts of Los Angeles and in exurban counties were seeing greenhouses
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sprout up weekly, some who would soon be surprised to learn there was no water or electricity
infrastructure within miles. Los Angeles was still ground zero to the retail economy, and still one
of the most prized sites to build manufacturing and indoor. (This is not to mention CBD, which
as noted in Chapter 4 was experiencing its own bizarre boom.)
The contradictory ways cannabis produced value in fugitive and not-so-fugitive ways only
became clearer as the legalizing industry further integrated into global chains of capital. A new
influx of venture capitalist investors lessened the prospects of new Angeleno small business
owners entering the market – and accessing profit. New social equity programs meant to increase
licensing still structured access in ways that required massive capital, and forced business owners
into awkward partnerships and predatory deals. Many elite business actors were happy to cheat
the social equity system to tap into the massive flows of cash in and of out of the cannabis
industry. Both smaller “legacy market” or fugitive actors and newer Black, Latinx and
indigenous entrepreneurs like Tonya appeared small fish in a tsunami of speculative capital.
On the other hand, a new politics regarding re-valuation of Black life was fueling a desire to
confront crises at the intersection of race, policing and capitalism through cannabis. A diverse set
of entrepreneurs like Tonya set their sights on cannabis, seeing hopes to finally address a
massive racialized wealth gap that had worsened during what at this point it’s best to call the
Great Restructuring of 2008-9. Many were also unprepared or unsure of how to find their place
when quite literally – as the Crenshaw protests exemplified –fewer spaces fit zoning rules and
were remotely affordable in a still-gentrifying city. They found themselves in a complex political
position as the project of accruing intergenerational wealth for communities of color through
ownership channels redirect energy from other projects, like organizing BIPOC cannabis
workers to ensure they too could benefit from the value they had helped generate.
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Similar to the public contestations regarding dispensary presence and disorder, the debates
in Crenshaw were underpinned by questions of who belongs and who should benefit from the
value accumulated in cannabis – and what that value should look like. These were inseparable
from the reproduction of racialized and gendered power enshrined in Los Angeles’ spatial and
economic order and the prospects of finding one’s plot in the plantation. Increasingly shaping
such debates, I argue, was a wider disjuncture between the kinds of repair that cannabis
economies offered, and the liberal project of reparations embodied in social equity policies.
The work of Jovan Scott Lewis offers a critical way to understand these complex politics of
fugitive value creation – and their continual construction in relationship to racial capitalism -
through his concept of repair (Lewis 2018, 2020). Examining the lottery and other scams that
capture leakages of values at the edges of outsourced global finance systems in Jamaica, Lewis
exposes these processes as fundamentally responses to an economy of sufferation, to a
generation of men threatened with becoming “wotless ones” whose self-worth was a “complex
conflation of masculinity and market logic” (Lewis 2020:12). Deborah Thomas identifies a
“racially vindicating capitalist consumerism” that emerges in dialectical position to a global
economy that leaves Jamaica, post-independence, facing immiseration and little prospects of
mobility. The scam, in this context, “was the most viable and profitable means of gaining real
wealth and advancement, especially when compared with the limited means of alternative
opportunity” (Lewis 2018:1032). But more importantly to this context is the ways these
economic schemes become – “ethically an act of reparation” – one whose victims were
deserving, one upon whom the Jamaican state depends, and ultimately, a means of “moral
obligation to recuperate debt for…colonial injuries” (Lewis 2020:30)
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It’s no coincidence that the initial framing for social equity in cannabis was spoken about as
reparations, as a chance to provide repair for the violence of racial capitalism embodied in the
war on drugs and tied to the afterlives of enslavement. Even prior to the social equity debates, I
suggest, cannabis was already a means for repair in Lewis’ sense, for extracting more value from
the dominant forces linking police power, whiteness and capital. Some of those I spoke to who
had faced jail time or were directly impacted by criminalization were the most cynical about the
prospects of a formal economy that could benefit; some sought to circumvent legalization
altogether, and some to build what they could with a plan to cash out quick. For others, cannabis
was also more, aligned with the broader projects of fugitive care and science that expanded far
beyond a singular formulation of reparations: it was a way to heal the harms in their
environment. It was an antidote to Big Pharma. It was a new relationship with nature and plants.
It was about incommensurable moments of pleasure, of slowing down time. In many ways, then
it was as much about providing others relief and finding reprieve from the experiences of
poverty, inequality, premature death that defined life for many.
As Lewis’ work underscores, the relationship to repair must be understood as situated in
place and entangled in the construction of race, gender, sexuality. Many I spoke to in the
industry were women and/or queer and trans, affected by employment exclusions and income
gaps that seemed more surmountable in cannabis. Some young male participants were part of a
generation whose options often felt like, in one young budtender’s words, “a shitty grocery store
or a sentence.” Still others sought out queer kinship, a multi-racial and cross-gender solidarity, a
place free of harassment and for healing.
Yet as Lewis notes, the desire for repair also underscores the limits of liberal projects of
reparations, like social equity. The pace of such policy-administrative projects proved
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increasingly hard to bear in a context where every day waiting for a license could mean having to
pay rent for an empty space, having to forego any steady income, or any number of risks. At the
same time, social equity was enmeshed in shifting regulatory systems that many resented and
viewed as tied to the same carceral systems that had harmed communities. The economy’s full
assimilation (noted in the last Chapter) via slow legalization into an urban planning and
regulation model of strict zoning, taxes and fines, put participants even more squarely facing a
system of policy and planning that as Moten and Harney share, “renewed dispersal and
deputisation of state violence, aimed into the fugitive, ambling neighborhoods of the
undercommons” (2013:75). Post-legalization, where police prior had simply seized cannabis
value via violent raids, now it was also doing so by capturing most of the cannabis tax money in
Los Angeles, which was well above that in any other industry.
With steep costs of legalization and survival in this expensive game, many Black and brown
entrepreneurs found themselves willingly and unwillingly allying themselves with white,
wealthy venture and institutional capital. Some of these actors – especially newer ones -were
used to dealing with this, coming from entertainment, sports or real estate. Others tried every
avenue and found the realities of “boostrapped,” self-funded capital at the tune of $1 million to
start a dispensary an impossible task. The lack of city supports and funding only made survival
harder. Many wrestled with trading away their real rights over their business to gain a salary and
some profit down the line to appear on paper as the social equity owner, and others had no
problems being the brokers for bad and predatory deals, seeing the game already fixed.
The slow and uncertain promises of reparations could not compare to the ways many had
already found means to create repair via cannabis through fugitive circuits of value. Such repair
felt even more fragile, as legalization was only further integrating cannabis into a racialized
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capitalist model of accumulation – one situated at a particular post-Fordist juncture driven by
shareholder values and a certain race-blindness (or at the least, multicultural ideology). This was
a crisis of value undermining the prospects of equity: Would the economy’s wealth generation
shift away from the material economy to being merely a vehicle for speculation and marketing
share? Would the less measurable and more intangible and communal forms of value be lost to
the sped-up commodification process and to new forms of economic predation?
If it was just about individual proclivities, perhaps. But cannabis was still a site for active
movement politics, and queer, abolitionist, and labor activists refused a narrative that the only
way cannabis could benefit communities was through pure wealth accumulation. The porous
nature of all of the coalitions struggling to find a foothold – the blurred lines among industry
lobby, racial and criminal justice advocates, or labor – all made coalition building more complex,
but that did not foreclose shifting alliances and expanding focus on questions like community
reinvestment. New frontiers for political struggle emerged regarding where and how the value
cannabis generated was recycled into state and city coffers (most often into the hands of police).
Groups like Medmen found undoing past mechanisms of value harder than it looked, faced with
organized workers who sought to preserve the meaningful elements of their labor. Others fought
against social equity predations and demanded real funds and support for start-ups. It turned out
neither the jolt of legalization nor millions in fast cash capital could shake cannabis fully from its
path dependency, especially the stickiness of cannabis as medicine and as a communal project.
Repair and reparations might co-exist, at least for a moment, through more engagement in both
everyday worksites and in building new political horizons.
Hanging on to Crenshaw
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“To Repair – to mend, to restore to a sound or good state after decay injury or partial
destruction. Reparation – payment for an injury, redress for a wrong done,” retired prosecutor,
first responder and now cannabis advocate Yvette McDowell, would often read when speaking to
audiences at forums and events proliferating on social equity in 2018. I met her at one such
event, geared mostly to women entrepreneurs in Inglewood, and she was decked out with a clean
and tight, almost military-precise haircut, and a Notorious BIG shirt (despite her West Coast
roots). After a warm handshake, and smile, she asked me point blank: “Honey, do you think a
license is going to repair decades of violence and harm?”
McDowell grounded her approach in framings that view the responsibility of government to
repair past harms that would limit opportunity. She underscored her point by sharing how she
saw “more blood than you can imagine” as a Black woman in prosecutorial and first responder
work in LA’s communities of color. When we talk about the war on drugs – what are we
are…talking about is a loss of freedom, loss of life, loss of education, access to education, future
employments - all of these things.” She recalled how with every prosecution, she wondered how
a young man or woman’s life would be indelibly impacted, including being barred from financial
aid or public housing. Now she wanted to know what it would mean to truly account for these
accumulated harms. Different from more broad-based articulations of economic equity, the
injuries and harms to be addressed in social equity were supposed to be related to cannabis
criminalization. As Yvette’s comments reflect, the effects were scaled far beyond an individual;
they included the shattering of households that, and the neighborhood-scale and urban losses as
revenue went to militarized tanks versus social goods like parks and public health.
43

43
Broader research on the harms of the war on drugs were also laid out in reports produced at this time; see
appendix A.
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Some months prior, on a December day in 2017, LA City Council member Marqueece
Harris-Dawson, representative to part of South Central, laid out just some of those harms in his
closing speeches before a unanimous vote for the full package of the city’s new cannabis
regulation. Hammered out over the course of some 19 months, in dozens of public hearings,
many of these conversations had often centered in the Rules, Election, Intergovernmental
Relations and Neighborhood (REIN) Committee. Despite the clunky and fairly-boring name,
quite a few REIN meetings over the last two years turned to impromptu protests at key junctures
(including adjoined by several worker-led rallies and marches), several went on nearly 3 hours
and late into the night, and there was never a shortage of stories. Chaired by Council President
Herb Wesson, one of the city’s chief power brokers, Harris-Dawson (a veteran of South Central
social justice movements), as well as Jose Huízar (who had all but flipped his position from the
ban he helped launch in 2013) led most meetings, making it appropriately, a process helmed by
Black and Latinx municipal officials.
There was also quite a bit of tears of exhaustion among the 200-plus people gathered in City
Council chambers. The clock was ticking on the launch of the adult-use market, set for January
1, 2018 by Proposition 64, and many questions hanging in the air. But Harris-Dawson grounded
the gravity of the moment in a geography of state-sponsored racialized violence and
dispossession four decades old, in a seminal moment that paraphrasing would do no justice:
“In 1970, Richard Nixon expanding and instituted what we refer to the war on drugs,
to control the Black Panther Party, activists, Blacks and anti-war hippies. and cities and
counties and states across the country have been doing that, been carrying out that policy,
sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly. Certainly we've had our fair share of it here
in Los Angeles, and what we will do today, what we will do here is we will shut down one
of the major fronts of the war on drugs. Probably the most significant and consequential
front on the war on drugs - and that's something that I don't want to get lost as we struggle
out the very, very important details. In this very city, in my district, I think this
neighborhood has sometimes been in the 8th, sometime been in the 9th, and sometimes in
the 10th, the point is we sent from parker center right across the street, we sent tanks into
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south L.A. To knockdown people's houses while they were in it and run them out of it on the
chance that we might find them with a narcotic.
We put scores, hundreds of thousands of people in jail, many of the people I grew up
with, just as smart and just as curious and eager and honest as I am ends up trapped in the
justice system for life because once you get one conviction, because -- they get another
conviction and we do something called three strikes later which made sure their third
conviction made it so they never got out of prison. You can't do this even though you served
your time. The amount of suffering and pain that is still in the streets today.”

Harris Dawson’s opener echoed Yvette’s call for repair, and reminded of the recently-revealed
Nixon aid quotes that had finally confirmed the long-understood racial and political project
behind the war on cannabis (Baum 2016). The councilperson went on to describe the collateral
consequences of the war on drugs, including the crises produced through parental incarceration -
80% of which was linked to cannabis and other drug possession. 70% of children affected lived
in South Central. He pointed to the potential for intergenerational repair, for giving young people
a chance who had been impacted “a policy set up before they were born.” Social equity, in this
context, was an opportunity to resolve some of the crises produced by the organized violence and
active abandonment of generations in key neighborhoods of LA. Dawson laid out:
“I think our social equity program goes a long way. It’s not perfect. It doesn't get
everybody it should get. It probably includes some, owe a few people it shouldn't and
exclude some people that it should not. But our social equity program and I say this without
fear of contradiction, is the most aggressive, the most progressive and the most just social
equity program that anyone has anywhere in the United States of America.”

The “less than perfect” may have referred to how, at one of the last REIN hearings,
frustration had centered on who and how would be included in the new Social Equity Program
(SEP), which in final settlement was to “repair the harm caused by the War on Drugs and the
disparate enforcement of cannabis prohibition.” The SEP had three prongs: set-asides in
licensing and small business supports, targeted hiring requirements and training, and community
reinvestment, all geared to communities and individuals “disproportionately harmed” by
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cannabis criminalization. Specific elements of the SEP were tabled for further discussion to get
at least a skeleton policy passed before the January 1, 2018 market launch. As Yvette’s
comments pointed out, implementing these ideals of reparation was much easier said than done,
especially with the rapid changes occurring in the industry and the many new actors at the table.
Let us jump back right after hearing Yvette speak at the women’s social equity event in
Inglewood. After Yvette laid out the cold hard truth about the limits of licensing, I joined a group
at a very local bar down the street from the gallery-meeting space for a much needed drink-
smoke. It was an old school bar that served fried chicken from a window back door, veteran
discounts and occasional karaoke nights – an island of Black Los Angeles culture on a strip of
rapidly changing art and restaurant spaces geared to emerging residents attached to the growing
“Silicon Beach.” I knew this strip from when I grew up; it also happened to be well into former
Crips territory. The neighborhood, and the bar, was filled with ghosts of the war on drugs. The
group of Black women, mostly in their 40s and 50s, assembled understood many of these
histories intimately, yet also represented a quickly changing cannabis scene.
Janet had brought us together. She was a cannabis advocate-attorney who had both fought
for criminal justice reform and did corporate law represented numerous cannabis manufacturers,
cultivators and would-be dispensary owners – quite a few of whom were operating in the fugitive
market. Janet was one of the few attorneys charging minimal (and sometimes nothing) for her
services. Keaana, an activist-wellness coach who did online advising on how to cannabis for
health and productivity, had once been an underground cultivator herself. Sheryl had built one of
the first approved social equity businesses in Oakland and was visiting to share her experience
creating a high-end cannabis vape pen and accompanying fashion times. Each of them was active
in trying to shape social equity policy - and each frustrated by the pace of change at the city,
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including the lack of direct funding for any equity programs. They also were finding it hard to
understand why it was so challenging to come to any agreement among different social equity
groups regarding what reparations would look like.
Despite the serious obstructions, there was a lot of laughter to make it less heavy. Cannabis
social equity and legalization was widening an already vibrant cast of characters. A longtime
friend of mine, young Black queer cismale friend of mine eventually came to the bar; he and I
had worked many years prior together in the legacy market, and he soaked up all the stories of
what can only be referred to as the “shadiness.” One particular entrepreneur who we can call
Cookie was emerging as a quite visible deal-maker, and had allied herself with a famed former
cocaine trafficker and had been doing all kinds of televised gigs and reality-tv like public stunts
decked in fabulous jackets. (Her main claim to fame prior had been a public fight with a teen
celebrity outside a Beverly Hills restaurant in 1992). Other absurd characters included a
disbarred City Councilperson who was claiming to represent Latinos, and a new disgraced
former union head, now-director of an entrepreneurship group. “It seems like cannabis turning
out to be a nice place to go if you’ve been kicked out of everywhere else,” Keanna laughed.
Janet replied, “But please, before you come out, put on some makeup, fix that wig, get that cheap
jacket off, mama!”
There were also some drinks downed with exasperation. They talked about sitting
stonewalled out of new cannabis industry association meetings dominated by $16 drinks,
powerpoints full of projections about wealth in the industry, and white guys in suits and a few
business-executive-white women who literally acted like they were not in the room. One of the
few new mainstream industry conferences to offer a social equity panel did so altogether offsite,
in an annex to the main conference space. Sherly relayed stories of unfair deals controlled by
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more established white entrepreneurs in Oakland, who were required to offer space or capital to
equity applicants and did so with plans in place to later evict the partner operators. Equally
concerning though was the willingness of different actors, some BIPOC, to claim to be the
source of knowledge on social equity, even when so much was still up in the air. Would-be-
entrants were expending life savings for a space in line that did not yet exist. “It’s the integrity,”
Sheryl lamented. “The worst part: Why do we do our own people wrong?” It echoed frustrations
I had heard and felt in immigrant rights works, of the slew of notarios willing to take advantage
of desperate undocumented clients.
The rapid fire of analysis via whiskey, gin and flower, and Yvette’s comments some hours
before, highlighted the challenges before social equity policymakers and advocates across
California. In Los Angeles lucrative market, organizations, even after months of social equity
hearings did not share a consistent understanding, and many were claiming to be the central
voice to define reparations, equity and what comes next. Many were desperately trying to hold
on to space before the market was fully out of reach during the five years the market was legally
protected from corporate owners buying a large number of licenses.
Among those key voices was the California Minority Alliance (CMA). “After all these
years, no other organization has been able to get the city council’s attention in the manner that
we have, and that means a lot, just to see how they have been regulating for years and running
and doing things,” one CMA activist noted when he and I spoke early in the process. His
reference to “how they have been regulating” said it all, bringing to the foreground ten years
under the not-so-interim ICO, the continual turn to governing space through violence, and an
apparatus of policing yet tolerating medical cannabis that by that time, had left many people with
fines, fees, lawsuits and lost property, not to mention jail sentences and records.
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Formed in 2016, as the city launched the formal public engagement for input on the new
adult-use regulation, CMA quickly garnered the attention of Council President Herb Wesson and
other REIN members. The speed at which CMA moved social equity to a front-line issue was
surprising, aided in part by the conjuncture of Black Lives Matter protest movements that were
moving the conversation on policing in new directions. In a post-Ferguson US, the conversation
on cannabis and policing could not be easily diluted, especially as data on the sheer lack of
diversity in ownership in the adult-use markets of Colorado and Washington underscored the
ways legalization could further inequality. CMA’s leadership also had ties to more established,
long-term voices in the (middle to upper class) Black community and politics, particularly the
California NAACP. CMA did not explicitly represent formerly-incarcerated or “legacy” market
actors alone, as much as a mix of different Black and brown entrepreneurial interests, both new
to cannabis altogether or fugitive market actors seeking licensing.
One co-founder of CMA operated (and faced significant jailtime for) a series of dispensaries
in South LA and Compton, and had been active in the Greater Los Angeles Collective
Association (GLACA). The network had been a chief ally of the UFCW Local 770 in the
struggle for Proposition D (2013). GLACA’s leadership had their own struggles, with a major
shake-up in what was originally a rag-tag group of owners that Arik described, who had gone
head-to head with the City Attorney and made the police flinch. The end result of whatever
messy drama ensued – that included licenses being traded and duplicated – meant there were
now several groups in operation: a broader Southern California Coalition (SCC), under which
CMA participated for a while, and another group of mostly Prop-D owners, branded United
Cannabis Business Association (UCBA). The latter’s naming evinced the willingness to operate
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more like an industrial lobbying group, and along the way, some medical cannabis operators,
including a prominent Latina, dropped out of the scene altogether.
Divisions hardened in 2017 when UCBA made an initial attempt at a ballot initiative that
would, for all intents and purposes, grandfather in the 135 (or 170, depending on who you asked
qualified) dispensaries legalized by the very last iteration of local medical marijuana regulations
- Proposition D (2013). Besides enumerating a gross receipt tax, it would otherwise have left the
market fairly restricted legally. In many ways it represented a continuation of the prior medical
model of less-than-licensing, which was just fine for both anti-cannabis advocates and a potential
future monopoly of existing shops. It also left cultivation and manufacturing off the table,
ostensibly retaining much of the existing fugitive supply chain networks. The legislation ignored
a new crop of delivery operations. Much harder to pin down, a growing number of canna-
operations that would simply post up a name, menu of strains, and a phone number for direct
delivery on cannabis advertising platform such as Weedmaps, regardless of legal regulations.
Some of these were direct relationships with cultivators, others were tied to unregulated “brick-
and-mortar” dispensaries, but all were treated as non-existent in the proposed Measure.
The somewhat-overconfident gesture spurred quick backlash from the SCC and other groups
representing many unregulated operations interested receiving a license, including delivery
companies. They argued the current order would become an official monopoly, one that would
offer benefit mostly non-Black (and to some extent, non-Latinx) actors. Aside from Clarence,
only two other Proposition D shops were Black-owned. Eventually, CMA would partially split
from SCC to more adequately center Black and brown operators, including reaching out to local
entrepreneurs who were new to cannabis to offer help navigating the confusing policy landscape.
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Learning from past mistakes, and mirroring new directions in equity-centered stakeholder
engagement, the city put forward a ballot measure (Measure M, 2017) instead that called for the
public hearings process to determine the city’s licensing landscape. The only certainty was a
10% taxes for gross receipts. These added to the substantive state-level taxes on the product, and
in total amount to 35% on any retail transaction – which in part guaranteed its support by even
anti-cannabis advocates. (As noted in Chapter 5, many owners were willing to counter the
dominant neoliberal trend of stripping away all taxes to gain a chance at licensing, and to show
that they were a part of the city’s future.)
UCBA walked back it’s monopolistic measure, and the more expansive measure won with
nearly 80% of Angeleno’s votes. Councilmembers also tacked on new language when the
measure was codified into the city’s record, enshrining the call for repair and reinvestment for
the war on drugs, that would set off a brand-new conversation on social equity throughout the
hearings. The emphasis by vocal organizations and individuals attending on racial justice and
drug war reparations spurred special designated hearings just to discuss this topic.
Several other groups were also active participants in the city’s newly-launched stakeholder
process and in the debates on social equity and repair, including the Drug Policy Alliance (that
had spearheaded the Reform CA Proposition 64 movement). DPA’s statewide director, Cat
Packer, was a relentless presence at council meetings - and in many ways did become the public
voice for social equity. At each meeting, her message was succinct and clear, pointing to the
disproportionate arrests and impact on Black communities, and the need for a reparative frame.
She often cited Alexander’s New Jim Crow (2010). Packer drew Wesson’s attention so much that
he would appoint her to be the City’s first Department of Cannabis Regulation (DCR) head in
2018. By placing a 28-year old queer Black woman to head of a first-of-its kind regulatory body,
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the Council made clear they had paid attention to the consistent organizing at meetings at the
intersections of LGBTQ and racial justice movements.
The UFCW Local 770, given its long history (detailed in prior chapters) of organizing on
cannabis regulations, was also an active force in the social equity conversation. Harris-Dawson
and others were especially concerned that the ideas being put forward draw from existing policy
models and align with proven mechanisms for equity. He helped bring UFCW to the table to
ensure reference to and learning from Los Angeles’ other increasing ventures in the areas of
equity, such a wide swath of labor-community crafted community benefit agreements (Baxamusa
2008; Beach 2008; Saito 2012). Growing ranks of cannabis union members were interested in
participating in the social equity debates, some seeking to start their own businesses and confront
policing, frustrated with a conversation often driven by license holders.
Yvette’s centering of the incommensurable harms of the war on drugs, and the bar scene
afterward, made it quite clear that there was a gap between the kinds of public conversations
happening on reparations and the real frustrations and demands. In one Latinx activist’s words,
“CMA, UCBA, SCC – it doesn’t matter. They are all the same behind closed doors; they all
smoke together, shake hands, and want control.” The long-time medical distributor explained
that she thought the policy debates mostly boiled down to one thing: “Who will be the
gatekeeper for the licenses.” Her claim, while dramatic, resounded with the ways some of these
coalitions offered publicly at City Council, and in their own community events, to be the primary
source for vetting future applications. But it was also clear that many organizations adjusted to a
position of compromise on key questions of reparations, needing expedient solutions to advance
licensing options, especially with so many large corporate actors waiting in the wings.
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Besides a broader historical inability for white audiences to discuss the issue of reparations
without launching into individualizing narratives about their own lack of culpability (something
that happened many times when cannabis reparations came up in hearings), California’s anti-
affirmative action Proposition 209 (2009) explicitly banned what might be conceived as racial
preferences in state and local government. “In a post-Prop 209 world, you can’t just say race,”
one UFCW attorney explained to me. As Leland Saito explains, 1990s and 2000s political and
legal shifts in California and in the US had led to a focus on “race neutral” policies that not only
“do not counter existing racialized processes” but “have a disproportionately negative effects on
racial minority groups compared to whites” (Saito 2009:33).
44

Most major cannabis coalitions in Los Angeles accepted this reality, and advocated for a
race-neutral position, in the hopes that it might avoid a legal challenge. A seminal early letter to
the Council and to the broader cannabis community from SCC/CMA read:
“Los Angeles’ Social Equity Program has the strongest likelihood of success if it is both
race-neutral on its face and in application, and works towards increasing responsible
inclusiveness and access to the cannabis industry, rather than restricting access to only
minority applicants.”

Language by activists, owners and industry groups thus shifted to adopt a language of
equity. The concept of social equity had come from further north along the Pacific coast, where
policymakers involved in the broader effort for racial equity had championed cannabis regulation
in Oakland that would prioritize those affected by the war on drugs. Darlene Flynn, a lead in the
effort, had come from Seattle, where she had been part of the historic work to create racial
indicators for equity, an Equity Impact Review Tool, that would be utilized to guide
policymaking in Kings County (Bronstein et al. 2014). The equity guidelines and committee,

44
Tracy Schlesinger notes that multiple tools of mass incarceration, such as mandatory terms and sentence
enhancements, fit the pattern of race-neutral policies that lead to destructive consequences for communities of color
(Schlesinger 2011).
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Chris Benner and Pastor explain, started as “response to racial disparities in the region, including
education gaps between whites and Blacks as well as the disproportionate number of boys and
men of color being incarcerated,” and grew to a comprehensive lens to guide urban planning in
racially inclusive ways (Benner and Pastor 2015:186).
Social equity, in other words, offered a shift away from the politics direct reparations
towards shifting market rules. Familiar with the growing influence of equity movements, UFCW
also embraced the frame to ensure that other forms of protections and benefits could also be
included, to both address past harms and discuss other future racialized harms. But this trade off
had risks to bury the desire for institutionalized reparations was frustrated, one McDowell sought
to center in her graphic discussion of the “blood” on the city’s hands. It was also made more
complex by a race-neutrality that skewed away from the ways the programs this idea was based
on, like those in Seattle, directly addressed racial inequality. How then, did the city officials,
cannabis advocates, and others end up re-imagining reparations?
If these Maps Could Talk
As the social equity program took shape, new frustrations emerged – much of which
reflected the complexities of measuring the harms of the war on drugs and assessing the value
the cannabis economy held for communities. In many ways, policymakers (rightly) struggled
once again with the incommensurable value and loss, and how to disburse and deploy resources
accordingly. All this was layered upon the continued effects of the anti-drug industries explained
in Chapter 2, the continued proliferation of prohibition discourses that had convinced many that
cannabis was the root of harm for communities of color. This awkward task was clear in a hot
summer in 2017, when the city first unveiled its complete equity plan. The first public meeting
solely dedicated to social equity, held at the Watts Labor Community Action Committee
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(WLCAC). The organization seemed ideal: created in 1965 that had symbolized the kinds of
community-labor coalitions that came to redefine Los Angeles, and South Central in particular,
as a bridge for Latinx and Black organizing (Bauman 2007; Laslett 2010). The forum was also
one of the first major events for DCR Director Packer to address the public in her new position.
It happened to also be full in the dry August heat in 2017, so not the day to pack into a large
warehouse-like space.
I met with UFCW’s team right before this major meeting, as the audience was packing the
large warehouse-turned-community theater. A Latina woman in her 60s sat down next to us, her
hair a touch of gold and gray. She asked us for help in Spanish, because no translation seemed
available. Dolores, one of the more recent organizers to join the UFCW team, asked the attendee
what brought her to the meeting. “I heard they were going to talk about having marijuana in our
neighborhoods. I wanted to tell them no more!” she replied excitedly. She wasn’t the only one: a
whole row of middle-aged Black women, who said they live close by for most of their lives,
echoed the sentiment, when we passed them an informational flyer about worker’s rights in
cannabis. “The last thing we need is more weed in our neighborhoods,” one woman exclaimed.
Some of the work ahead for social equity was clear: How could this experiment in attempting to
infuse equity across an entire market be packaged, when many neighborhoods only had cannabis
eradication in mind for multiple reasons?
Around the room, the results of the social equity report by the city-hired consultants stood
against tri-fold poster boards, reminiscent of an academic conference, replete with eager young
white interns, sweating in the summer heat with full suits. The data from the social equity
analysis, much of it provided by UCLA’s Million Dollar Hoods Project, drew stark lines
233
regarding the racialization of policing (For some of the data, see Bryan et al. 2019). The red-lines
of arrests encircled predominantly South (Central) Los Angeles, to little surprise to many
cannabis workers, owners and advocates.
The vast maps towered high, capturing the jagged contours of Los Angeles, outstretched
along the south length as South LA
arced towards Long Beach. At the
flanks, the small cities that had broken
off in the decades of postwar white
flight and self-segregation into
independent cities were grayed out
(despite the heavy presence of arrests,
later analysis would confirm in the
County level). In the principal map,
most of the city read in yellow tones,
representing anywhere between 18 to
130 arrests annually between 2000 to
2018. The next bump up, average (131-
239) and above average (240-365)
arrests splotched orange and red mostly across the South LA regions, with the exception of parts
of the South “beach cities” near Torrance and San Pedro (See Figure 1).
Figure 2: Social Equity Maps – Cannabis Arrest Counts by Police
Reporting District. Produced by Amec Foster Wheeler and provided to
the public via the City of LA Chief Legislative Analyst Office.
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The next maps (see Figure 2)
posted were defined by starker
contrast; these images showed the
low-income and racial demographics
of these high to very high arrest
zones, highlighting the intersection
of class or race and arrests. The map
had deep concentrations of reds and
oranges because for the most part, the
population was predominantly Black
or Latinx, or low-income. The maps
told the story in large-format print,
and it was a clear story of
concentrated policing.
When the presentation started, Packer led the conversation, foregrounding in her usual
sobering tone the disparities that marked the long history of the war on drugs, with tempered
reference to the historic opportunity ahead to repair the harms. Then came the consultants: it
turned out the cadre of white interns was hired by the firm the city had contracted, a mostly-
white consultant group from wealthy Central Coast city of Santa Barbara to conduct the analysis.
It surprised me as someone who had been attending public hearings, I had never seen the
consultants. The work they presented in fact patched together other source. The policing data
came mostly from Million Dollar Hoods and the work of Black scholar and historian Kelly Lytle
Hernandez. They also quoted mostly from a patchwork of other reports submitted to council by
Figure 3: Social Equity Maps – Low Income Households by Police Reporting
District. Produced by Amec Foster Wheeler and provided to the public via the
City of LA Chief Legislative Analyst Office.
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advocates and industry groups, such as CMA, the LA Cannabis Task Force and other groups. (In
full disclosure, I authored one of these for UFCW Local 770; this was the first report I produced
based in part in learnings from this dissertation, with input from UFCW members. It also
included informational interviews with others working on equity policies such as a local
construction apprenticeship geared towards formerly-incarcerated people. - See Appendix A).
Perhaps most striking was the ways in which the complexity of the industry, and those who
contributed to its vast fugitive care and science, and the decades of organized violence and
disinvestment due to decades of the war on drugs, were flattened in singular maps. The equity
analysis hung in many ways on these limited maps. Kathyrn McKittrick points to the importance
of spatial and mapping processes such as “concealment, marginalization, boundaries” that define
Black (women’s) experiences and reproduce forms of difference (McKittrick 2006). In this case,
the maps did not give a sense of race, capitalism, and carcerality in an easy fashion; one could
see in that moment how we could end up, some months later, with McDowell frustrated at the
lack of in-depth understanding of the afterlives of racial violence.
One could see where this embodied a purposeful “race-neutrality” – that ultimately
enshrined whiteness. The analysis was even delivered by a technocratic white face, likely in
advance of its presentation before the full City Council. As Saito (2009) notes, race-neutrality
elides the entanglements of race and space, which as documented in Chapter 5, had
fundamentally shifted the survival and shape of medical cannabis and land access. The solution
of race-neutral maps, borrowed from Oakland, was in attempt to surface the racialized nexus of
criminalization with space by instead designating disproportionately impact by the war on drugs
at the neighborhood, or rather zip-code, level.
236
The focus on turning the complex harms of the war on drugs into a single set of indicators
spoke volumes to the ways in which data objects become given outsized value in their ability to
render state violence and capitalist inequality legible. This is not necessarily a bad thing;
legibility is key, and aforementioned projects like Million Dollar Hoods have been critical visual
storytelling tools deployed by activists. Problems arose when the maps came to stand in for a
more complex discussion reparations, and began to themselves gain outsized value as the ways
in which resources would be re-distributed.
Following the presentation, industry and activist energy began to be poured into the contours
of the map themselves. Some advocates challenged the findings in the maps and launched some
very direct contestations of the maps, before they could be brokered into law. Most
neighborhoods were either in South Central and a slim portion of Boyle Heights, and some
groups charged that Latinx were not represented (ignoring the presence of Latinxs in South
Central). A cluster of groups sought to include the wholly-absent San Fernando Valley within the
count of areas, particularly regions like Van Nuys or Pacoima that also had high arrests rates
affecting Latinx and some Black communities. (As Dr. Hope recalled to me, Black workers did
not just come to work in manufacturing from other areas to the region; there were also numerous
housing projects and working-class homes where Black families lived.) The patchwork of small
cities outside of official city of LA boundaries, borne of white flight, only complicated map-
making towards equity (cf. Davis 2006). In part, as the scholars who produced the arrest data
analysis noted, the zip code boundaries did not even fully measure police arrests because it
focused exclusively on marijuana; cannabis was not always the charge, but it was an excuse to
237
pull someone over and then arrest them for another accusation, or to present them a quality-of-
life ticket or other broken-windows byproducts.
45

The debates over the maps hinted to significant questions over race and space, and who
deserved to be included in the cannabis project of equity (or really reparations). Several
prominent activists argued that Latinx individuals had not suffered as much, so why should they
benefit? On the flipside, some Latinx entrepreneurs cited the kinds of historical data mentioned
regarding the origins of the focus on “marijuana” (rather selectively) to claim that the
architecture of the war on drugs was geared against Latinx populations. The conflicts here at
times risked naturalizing race as a given biological fact, versus as constructed and contextual
process inseparable from capitalist inequality (not to mention altogether erasing Afro-Latinxs
and taking Latinidad as a given unifier – a paper in and of itself.)
The questions of race, space and deservingness brings us back Tonya, to Crenshaw, and to
the conflicts over shop location. While some of the language Tonya and comrades were bringing
echoed the 1990s anti-liquor store struggles, the Black-led local group’s demands were not
prohibition or elimination of cannabis, but changing ownership hands. When the Armenian-
owned dispensary opened on Crenshaw, it thus invalidated Tonya’s ability to open her future
shop, and threw her entire project towards disaster. On one hand, what the maps missed also
were the strict zoning codes regarding co-location of dispensaries and proximity to “sensitive
uses” that rendered an already desperate search for property even more challenging. The LA
Cannabis Co itself moved from another location in South Central because, while compliant to

45
Meanwhile, the framing of the equity policy did end up prioritizing those with prior cannabis arrests, which could
encompass the grievances of white cannabis entrepreneurs who had faced jail time. “It wasn’t just Black people,”
was a common refrain, which would usually be followed by a story about the time in which the white entrepreneur
speaking would describe their own arrests. More telling though was the occasional caveats – the several months
versus several years in prison, if any; the avowal that, in one white male’s words, “he wasn’t a dealer or anything”
that showed that the racialized police order had much softer effects, and that many, especially newer white
entrepreneurs viewed less-formal cannabis operators with disdain.
238
prior versions of Proposition D (2013) zoning laws, the 2018 regulations required greater
distance from schools and thus required moving. With the capital support and other assistance
that was originally supposed to be delivered via the City likely to be years away because of
funding stalls, and having invested already in building out her space, Tonya saw little chance of
survival if she tried to find a scarce new business location. She planted her feet to fight.
The broader gentrification of the Black community that centered on Crenshaw made the
tensions even greater. With the looming installation of the Crenshaw-Expo Metro rail lines, tied
to a growing network of trains connecting Los Angeles from the San Gabriel Valley to Santa
Monica, rental costs were going up for both commercial and residential properties. The idea of
who belonged in the historically Black-region, interlinked with the cultural hub of Leimert Park,
felt especially salient, spurring the signs reading “Save Crenshaw District” at the same protest.
Gentrification contributed to the sense of loss and harm expressed by Black organizers seeking to
prioritize their community in licensing.
Some social equity organizations urged recognizing the indisputable facts of Black
displacement in particular, learning from the ways Oakland’s social equity policymakers
struggled to account for this in setting licensing maps. The maps were a snapshot of a time that
was rapidly changing. Many of the areas slated for licensing set-asides were quickly changing in
terms of demographics, with an increasing number of white, middle class and wealthy residents
moving in to areas like Boyle Heights, Downtown LA and even the Northern ends of South
Central (Huante 2019; Mu’min 2015; Pastor, Hondagneu-Sotelo, et al. 2016). (This is not to
mention the not-so-new but at times ignored presence of Central American and Mexican
migrants in South Central, that were rarely discussed in a fairly simplified discourse among some
cannabis organizations equating South Central with Blackness.) While the racial reorderings
239
within these contexts is complex and contested, the fact remained that many Black (and Latinxs)
residents affected by the war on drugs – including from their testimonies before the council – had
fled central and South Los Angeles following arrests or loss of family to prisons; others were
displaced to more affordable areas like the Antelope Valley cities of Lancaster and Palmdale,
especially with the rise of flexible rate mortgages and other debt instruments targeted at
communities of color (De Lara 2018; Hayat 2016; Molina 2016). In response, the City and new
DCR department decided to define residency as living 5 years in any time period starting in 1980
to 2016 in the designated zip codes, and did not require much documentation as evidence.
This experiment in equity – in other words - was embedded in a landscape scarred by the
spatial and economic restructuring of Los Angeles accelerated during and post-recession – which
also involved shifting constructions of race and place.
46
Alfredo Huante lays out how the
struggle regarding displacement in areas like Boyle Heights was cast on multiple axes, including
by the idea of “Gente-fication” (or middle class Latinx-led gentrification) as either being a
friendly alternative to gentrification perpetuated to the ends of “racial and economic uplift”
versus a marker of the “honorary white” status given middle-class Latinos (Huante 2019:12).
Mapping gentrification, as Huante notes, increasingly involves examining tri-racial hierarchies
that connect the US and the rest of the Americas (Bonilla-Silva 2001; 2019). To make sense of
the shifting categories, activists on the ground were consistently having to triangulate (to
paraphrase Claire Jean Kim) racial categories to decide who should benefit from licensing – and

46
In South LA, increasing numbers of first and second generation working class Mexican and Central American
(with a wide range of identificatitons Latinx, some as Afro-Latinx, some as Black) residents had moved in over the
last decade-plus, though in this case new real estate commercial developers did not follow (Pastor, Hondagneu-
Sotelo, et al. 2016). This change preceded the recession and was longer-lasting, but it also contributed to the
overwhelming sense of Black loss across LA (Ibid.).
240
Armenians were often judged as honorary whites, especially in relationship to Black residents
(Kim 1999).
Gentrification was also occurring at the commercial real estate level, which as noted is less
understood and has its own complex relationships to race and neighborhood identity (Freeman
2011; Zukin 1987; Zukin, Lindeman, and Hurson 2017) There is much more exploration that
needs to happen to understand, in the future, how and why Armenians built insular capital and
power structures in Los Angeles, and in general, to an understanding of Los Angeles’ multi-
layered racial formations (For a start, see Cheng 2013; Saito 1998). What was clear though is
that in the context of an economy defined by speculative real estate capital and new waves of
commercial and residential displacement, and the depths of damage wrought by policing beyond
a documented cannabis arrest, the equity maps were failing to capture the real topography of Los
Angeles’ carceral, plantation geography and the ways it continually pitted communities against
each other in competition for scarce resources.
In the end, the maps were messy. Equity became a much more fraught and complex project
because it was impossible to clearly separate out the harms of the war on cannabis from a larger
set of processes by which racial capitalism has produced Black poverty and loss, specifically in
this case through the economic crisis and restructuring. In avoiding direct engagement with the
complexity of repair, and attempting to contain loss vis-à-vis a map, the city also was unable to
come to grips with the meanings behind every data point, the stories and representations and
spatial experience of loss gripping Black and brown LA.
What Nipsey Would Have Wanted
The deeper meanings and political-economic conflicts at stake became even clearer when, as
social equity struggled to a start in 2019, South Los Angeles tragically lost its home-grown hip
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hop talent and entrepreneur, 33-year old Nipsey Hussle (born Ermias Ashegorne, to an African-
American mother and Eritrean father). Nipsey was known specifically for investing funds from
his massive success as a rap star, including through innovative marketing of album, into
numerous businesses he built, including a clothing store, a burger joint, a co-working space and a
fish market. As a youth, he spoke about a plant to purchase “some real estate ... a real asset to
take care of my peoples,” speaking to the dream of land(Levin 2019). Tonya in fact spoke about
Hussle to local newspapers, sharing her own admiration for his vision for Crenshaw.
As social equity’s roll-out stalled, a new coalitional effort among Black and Latinx-led
groups arose to try to get funding to the program’s capital and lease support programs.
Testimonies in council began to cite Hussle and the title of one of his most famous albums “The
Marathon Continues” (contained in his clothing store name), as did social media tags of Nipsey’s
name and signature phrases in attempts to bring out people to share their testimony on the need
for social equity.
47
When one advocate posted a call for action to mobilize community members
to City Council to call for funding the equity program’s capital and land grants utilizing a Nipsey
meme and tags, she set off a flare off (that was repeated off-line, in person) regarding the desire
for the supplemental programs. “This is not what Nipsey would have wanted!” a prominent
social equity activist shot back. “Nipsey was about entrepreneurship, not welfare.” The
accusation that grant and loan programs were welfare was repeated in council chambers by some
advocates of social equity and roiled in confrontations among activists. These raised the ghosts
of 1980s and 1990s welfare queen mythologies that had been used to police Black lives and

47
Interestingly, Nipsey himself was not as much a public cannabis icon in the same way that Snoop Dogg or other
1990s rap icons were; in fact, in interviews he mentioned several times how we would curb his cannabis use to be
more productive, and in fact stopped smoking because of how “There is a different energy when you are sober.
Whatever opportunities you get, I want all of them. You might get 95% of the tree” he shared in one video
interview, speaking to his particular vision of entrpreneurialism (Gati 2020). Whiz Khalifa, himself known for his
cannabis consumption, had at one point given a strict public warning to Hussle about the use of blunts – in line with
the particular stigma against that smoking method described in Chapter 4.
242
responsibilize Black women in particular for the inequalities produced by racialized and
gendered capitalism (Collins and Mayer 2010; Di Leonardo 1998; Morgen and Maskovsky
2003).
The fight over Hussle’s legacy further speaks to tensions among how different actors
imagined reparations to be resolved, tied in part to fugitivity. One my first times meeting
Lynette, the leader of a new Latinx-led social equity group was during a city council meeting in
2017. I had just presented the report I had drafted with the UFCW on social equity policies, and
sat back down with that slight buzz that comes after presenting in a crowded room in the long
walkway in City Council before the massive chamber, like a royal subject petitioning a monarch.
Lynette sat next to me with spectacular lipstick and a kind of punk-fabulous vibe (who happened
to be an accountant, I later learned). She introduced herself with a smile, that then turned into a
scoff: “I just want you to know, you’re going to have to do better. We don’t just want to work for
white people. We’ve been slaves long enough.” She then handed me her business card.
Lynette’s comments point to how she felt that the union’s positioning regarding “good jobs”
was limited in its ability to enact repair. Tonya, too, had her doubts in regards to the focus on
jobs versus ownership. This tensions solidified became more apparent UFCW Local 770 staff
found themselves mediating between the owner and Tonya, after the union strongly advocated
for social equity. Organizers also did not want to alienate the LA Cannabis CO operator that had
been relatively open in the unionization campaign and negotiations and where numerous Black
and brown workers, including from the neighborhood were employed. The union also had strong
allies like the Black Worker Center in the fight to make for equitable development on Crenshaw,
and had been championing a model of Black-Latinx labor coalitions.
48

48
The union’s queer Latinx organizing director hailed from one of the more significant labor organizing campaigns
of the 21
st
century, a 15-year battle unionize the Tar Heel, North Carolina Smithfield plant. He had come in later
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On the other hand, organizers and close movement allies to the labor union were at times
dismissive of the entrepreneurial focus; one advocate compared them to the classes of Black and
Latinx non-profit housing developers and advocates who had embraced 1990s Clinton-era
housing development strategies that had indebted communities and failed to stem gentrification.
Their critiques had some validity (factually), but publications like Capital and Main, an outlet
tied to the union-allied group and Los Angeles mainstay LAANE, were also quick to write
damning critiques of social equity even before it launched (completely neglecting the worker
programs, and what they meant to many seeking stability and generational wealth.)
Indeed, some organizations did eschew the UFCW Local and even claimed that the union’s
interests and Black and brown’s communities were diametrically opposed. It did not help that
CMA hired a disgraced former service employees union leader arrested for embezzlement of
pensions as its executive director (cf. Pringle 2013; Shaver 2013). The director also claimed to
be an attorney, had worked in affordable housing development, and now styled himself a
business management and strategy expert. It would seem easy to argue that a clear-cut opposition
existed between labor and entrepreneurial groups, and especially given the anti-welfare
comments, a kind of libertarian, neoliberal ethos dominating the latter. One could say such
opposition stemmed from the idea that communities of color could not have both good jobs and
ownership under the aegis of racial capitalism, and one needed such to trade away the union
employment so the owners could manage costs (or vice versa).
But the fact was relationships were far more nuanced in practice. Leaving aside the jarring
case of CMA’s leadership, for other like Lynette and even Tonya, there were moments of
rapprochement with the union, attempts to find brief coalition. Lynette’s group in particular

stages of the fight to help win through building militant actions linking mostly-Mexican, Puerto Rican and Black
communities in explicit coalition, which also included Black solidarity against immigration raids (Bacon 2008).
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recognized the vast number of Latinxs working in the industry at the front lines and recognized
they could not afford to ignore its power. I held weeks on end of meetings with some of
Lynette’s associates, who were excited to co-create an apprenticeship program, and would draw
back of napkins sketches envisioning a massive complex for training unionized workers and
incubating entrepreneurs. Quite a few cannabis entrants showed an interest in finding more
common ground, and the union and some entrepreneurial advocacy groups engaged in some joint
lobbying efforts at times towards community reinvestment.
Anthropologist Carla Freeman, who worked in the Caribbean with women small business
owners, offers insight as well into understanding entrepreneurship in an interconnected, Black
diasporic lens. “Entrepreneurship signifies not just a particular path of income generation and
consumption but a new way of living and feeling,” Freeman explains of postcolonial contexts
(2015:14). She finds it hard to reduce the ideas about entrepreneurship that travel the globe into a
universalizing, neoliberal false-consciousness that valorizes selling oneself as a brand and set of
skills to survive. Looking at the Caribbean, Freeman situated women’s entrepreneurialism as
located in relationship to a concept of “reputation” that actually tied to “an oppositional,
anticolonial spirit” and Jamaican historical realties (Ibid.). Freeman’s analysis signals the
importance of trying to better understand what and how entrepreneurship is defined in specific
places and times itself as a politics and orientation towards broader structures and colonial and
racial capitalist power.
Tracing back to the histories of Marcus Garvey’s vision of “Black capitalism, self-
sufficiency, and cooperative capitalism,” Jasmine Johnson and Shaun Ossei-Owussu call into the
room the ways Black entrepreneurship in the US remained a critical grounds of political
possibility for self-determination throughout the 21
st
Century (2012:80). While few cannabis
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shops have aligned with the Black cooperative vision that Garvey expounded in the urban North
and Jessica Gordon Nembhard (2014) also links to the US South, in the shadow of Jim Crow,
these histories still reverberate with many of the actors involved in the social equity movement.
In particular, a large concentration of applicants who both had sufficient start-up capital and a
determination linked to cannabis as an opportunity for practice of Black freedom came from
Leimert Park, a hub of Black business with roots linking back to pan-Africanist movements. In
the current context, Nipsey’s work also put neighboring Crenshaw on the map as such a site -
and made Tonya’s claim to the land even more meaningful.
Tonya and many other’s embrace of what they started to call “Nipsey-nomics” positioned
entrepreneurship as an act of individual and collective self-determination in LA’s Black and
brown neighborhoods. Lynette’s partner would often talk about the Brown Beret movement and
the Panthers, and relate the quest for cannabis ownership in this light. (After all, isn’t this
ownership of the means of production?) But what Johnson and Ossei-Owussu also bring up is the
ways in which successive waves of urban renewal and later gentrification in California have
made Black entrepreneurial projects even more precarious, and tied up with retaining meaningful
cultural and social spaces, even through retail (2012). Different from the earlier phase of medical
marijuana where owners saw each other bound up in shared survival against policing, in this case
Tonya saw her owning a business tying her less to her Armenian colleagues and more as a
fundamental way to give back to the Black community, to hold ground against gentrification, to
retain physical and emotional space in Crenshaw.
From the perspective of understanding circuits of fugitive and not-so-fugitive value,
entrepreneurial ambitions appear to be a way to actually hold on to the value from these
companies and redirect them to Black and brown individuals. While an emerging cluster of
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Black and brown entrepreneurs (like Lynette) were not, in any extensive way, directly arrested
during the war on drugs, shifting criminalization meant the door was open to push for new
iterations of cannabis markets to enact reparations from broader racial inequalities. The word of
the day was intergenerational wealth – or the lack thereof – not to mention the loss of Black and
brown space due to gentrification and life due to mass incarceration generally. The ways in
which the social equity program itself was constructed – a singular license scheme that involved
at least 51% ownership –precluded formations like cooperatives from participating. These might
have lessened the bifurcated discussions between workers versus entrepreneurs, and given both
access to wealth creation. Instead, it facilitated a narrower version of small business ownership
and property in a plantation geography where scarce access to capital and land was entangled in
racial geographies.
The Licensing Trap, or Whiteness Wins Again
The same kind of racial triangulations occurring at the neighborhood level regarding who
should own in a given area refracted into a conversation about who should benefit from the
social equity preferences at all – often in tacitly assessing proximity to whiteness and existing
wealth. In some discourses, Armenians and other Middle Eastern groups had no place at all in
relation to equity as proximate to whiteness. But that did not stop many Armenian, Arab, and
Iranian not to mention Russian and Israeli, actors from remaining in the field from medical
marijuana or coming into it altogether. Interviewing and encountering several (and having some
approach me for support), many were ethnic entrepreneurial small business owners losing their
livelihoods in other sectors of a rapidly-restructuring economy. During the 2016 to 2020 Trump
era, several would-be cannabis cultivators or distributors I met complained of new tariffs and
sanctions rooted in racialized geopolitics disrupting old mechanisms of obtaining cheap supplies
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from China or, for many Middle Eastern business people, from Iran. When I would ask them
why the leap to cannabis, several explained that it was kin of some kind – a cousin, a brother,
and so on – who had worked in the industry’s medical marijuana days, and enticed them to bring
their remaining capital. Several I spoke to were far from elated when discussing their entry; at
least two older men, one nearly 70-year old Lebanese man and another 60-something Iranian
man, described this as “their last chance.” The more traditional retail they had depended on for
moving their goods (hardware in one case, decorative goods in the other) were foreclosed. Small
business ownership had hardly left them intergenerational wealth or much less retirement (thank
god for Medicaid, one sighed.) Los Angeles was, even before COVID-19, experiencing a new
wave of wealth eradication in immigrant and Black communities, due in part to the Amazon
behemoth rising around the city, from the Inland Empire to the ports.
Even if these business owners were losing their livelihoods, they generated little sympathy,
and many did little to build connections with Black and Latinx groups. Existing Armenian
cannabis dispensary owners were accused by local communities of running the fly-by-night,
mobile operations that had proliferated in South Central, and doing so in harmful ways for both
workers and community members. New business entrants were spoken about as sharks who had
no interest in cannabis but only in profit. On the flipside, several Middle Eastern shop owners
spoke with disdain about social equity, which, despite the language of racial-neutrality, was
equated by more than one new entrant as a program for “Blacks.” Others laughed, claiming the
program would eventually disappear; “It’s a joke, and we’ll get a license,” one Armenian real
estate operator scoffed.
Latinxs (or Latinos, as several I spoke to referred to themselves) were also in a complex
spot. For more than a year different emerging entrepreneurs and representative organizations
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fomented a narrow debate on whether Latinos had or had not suffered enough from the war on
drugs. Across the board, these discussions attempted to move beyond the concealment of racial
inequality and instead ended up referring to racial categories as fixed, distinct categories – that as
noted, wiped Afro-Latinidad from the map and played to trans-American racial hierarchies.
There is no romanticizing Armenian owners as hapless, well-meaning entrepreneurs, or
justifying lack of outreach and community engagement, or all the other accusations often levied
among some actors. What was striking though was how, through many discussions regarding
social equity (like those on welfare that were being replicated), whiteness escaped culpability.
There were many more white owners in the industry than Armenian, as well as Russian and
Israeli ones, but these often escaped the eye of critique.
In Janet’s eyes, plenty of US-born white entrepreneurs had no problem letting Black and
brown voices critique social equity and other operators in the hopes it would help shut the
program down and open up licensing. As a former corporate lawyer, she knew well, and often
cautioned her social equity clients: White wealth was far more masked than the petty capitalism
of some ethnic entrepreneurs and even petty landlords. It was held in vast swaths of property. It
was sitting as silent corporate partners in new social equity “firms,” managed by Black and
brown faces, that often also entangled future equity owners in loans and other debt instruments.
A new crop of less visible investment groups and venture companies – some tied to real
estate capital, others to entertainment, and even others to tech - were making many more moves
behind the scenes, and seeding entrepreneurs and incubators in far more insidious ways than the
storefront on Crenshaw. A few ambitious Black and brown entrepreneurs were allying
themselves with these forces, believing there was just no other way to access that kind of capital.
Many of these included sports and music industry figures, who were used to dealing with the
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manipulations of white wealth and found ways to navigate as they needed (and in some cases,
proved a convenient face for business enterprises). These were some of the frustrations echoed
that night in Inglewood at the bar, that riled Yvette up and made so many young entrepreneurs
and workers I spoke to feel helpless (think back even to Mariana, where this dissertation began.)
It was not a matter of just “government” restricting cannabis licenses, either, and creating
this scarcity. Behind the licensing debates, a still-punitive vision of cannabis regulation–
sustained by police forces, wealthy NIMBYs, and more than a century of propaganda –
artificially amplified competition. Shop owners seeking some upper hand in an increasingly
expensive game played into it as well. A wide range of entrepreneurs were also willing to ascribe
blame to an abstract unauthorized shop – a rogue shop, trap shop, illegal shop, whatever the
word of the moment was – that was still operating without a license and continually draw a line
of legality. (Yet, when pressed, few could define what set any of these shops apart, or whether or
not these shops had plans to apply for license.) Contradictorily, several prominent social equity
advocates were writing strong letters to the City Council and LAPD to call for shutting down
numerous other “illegal” dispensaries in South Central. Major advocates in the front for social
equity like CMA were now pushing for punitive action to in fact protect Black and Latinx
applicants, calling for more police aggressive action against “rogue shops,” the term of the day to
refer to unlicensed shops. The LAPD seemed to have no trouble listening: the month before the
call, they had presented before Council that there was almost $600,000 and 34,000 pounds of
cannabis ceased that year, and 428 arrests made. Yet the UFCW Local 770 and a growing
coalition of abolitionist-oriented activists, some with roots in the medical/queer cannabis era,
challenges this route, arguing that the first hurt in raids were workers – and with no clear pipeline
yet for social equity, how were businesses supposed to transition? DCR’s new head, Cat Packer,
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similarly cautioned against a drive for what she called “drug war 2.0.” But LAPD was far from
willing to let go of budgetary increases to enforce new cannabis regulation.
Partially, some of the fractures on the issue of both social equity support programs and the
policing of rival shops reverberated to larger, complex histories of Black (and Latinx) politics in
South Los Angeles interpellated with class that are hard to summarize here (cf. Murch 2015;
Sides 2006).
49
Thomas’s idea of a “racially vindicating capitalist consumerism”– while
discussed in the case of Jamaica – also offers some potential here to think about the ways in
which some Black and Latinx owners were willing to embrace the laws of both the market and of
the regulatory state to set the contours of repair/reparations (Thomas 2004:251). The terms of the
debate, for so many reasons, had already been constricted, and for some, the only way to beat the
system was to fully take up its rules in your favor – even if that meant replicating policing or
embracing a liberal, individualistic version of reparations.
Green Rush Blues, or Taking What You Can
These choices and tensions among Black, Latinx, Armenian and other non-white
entrepreneurs have to also be contextualized with the mounting pressure that came with
legalization. While the larger corporate conglomerates were held at bay through regulations that
limited acreage or numbers of licenses, and by federal illegalization, there were still plenty of
less “risk-averse” venture capitalists, real estate actors, and other financiers more embedded in
California’s economic geography waiting to drop millions for a license.

49
For example, the leadership CMA was closely allied to the state’s NAACP. In California, and South Central in
particular, the NAACP had a long history of a more conservative and less confrontational political line on Black
politics (Bernstein 2010; Pulido 2006; Sides 2006). This is not to say that they were the exact replica of the NAACP,
but it does point to the need for nuanced understandings of these movements and organizations as rooted in the rich
complexity of Black (and brown) politics, and that also understand differing class politics.
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Why the green rush to capture value from these new players? Consumption – at least visibly
enumerated – was growing. Speculation had increased the kinds of cash circulating in cannabis,
through investment and acquisition. With the new regulation passed in December 2017, the city
had limited the number of licenses to 450 total: roughly 150 for the existing “Proposition D”
businesses, and then 300 to be gradually released to social equity-qualified applicants. This
limited market access – that came with the ability to enter the country’s largest cannabis
consumer market – began to put an even greater premium on licenses as a commodity
themselves and ended up giving social equity participation a steep market value.
For those who did not qualify for social equity, either those still in the underground industry
or new investors seeking to enter the market, they began a furious search for “social equity
partners” who could sign up as the “51% owner.” All manufacturing and cultivation had to be
either tied to an existing “Prop D” dispensary (which means they had to admit they were
operating without a license during the medical marijuana period), or have a social equity
component. The most valuable asset – the “golden ticket,” as Janet would often call them?
Dispensary licenses. With news reports on business-oriented channels like CNBC reiterating the
potential monetary value accruing in almost weekly stories, and speculation described in Chapter
4 from venture-style companies like Medmen, dispensary licenses themselves became valued in
2 to 3 million or more absent any property or any inventory, before the doors were even open.
The finalized regulations kicked off a frenzy to find social equity applicants – and with it, a
host of both direct and indirect value-extraction. In addition to the non-white entrepreneurs,
venture capital land firms white-owned business owners from sectors like technology or real
estate all joined the scramble. Some offered equity-qualified applicants a place in a company
with no actual control. As Athena’s assessment in Chapter 5 about pre-legalization partnerships
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between cannabis producers and those “listening to the greed,” fraught alliances with capital and
those with the wealth of fugitive knowledge were nothing new to cannabis. Now, they were
perhaps more visible and more lucrative, and harder to understand thanks to the variety of legal
mechanisms to obfuscate ownership and hide wealth. I can easily say that many of the
predominantly white and wealthy or professional class Black and brown entrepreneurs I spoke to
had no qualms about portraying those they wanted to partner with as needing them, not the other
way around. They often discussed fugitive actors wanting to transition as clueless about the ways
“real” business works: “They can’t even read a balance sheet,” was a common complaint, or
“They don’t even know what branding is.” Those being offered partnerships who had never
worked in cannabis, but lived in the zip codes and had entrepreneurial ambitions, were discussed
in even more dismissive language sometimes. (Some “incubators” even sent representatives
door-to-door in South Central to find applicants and sign them up as passive license applicants.)
Many new entrants and behind-the-scenes operators believed in a shareholder capitalist view
of reality, that the true power and knowledge – and value - in a market lay with the corporate
management and investors, despite how much of the industry had been built without these layers
of control. Increasingly, as social equity policies progressed, an increasing number of investment
groups and financial actors who were seeding social equity incubators here and there,
involuntarily tying these actors together through a subversive strategy to gain market share and
ultimately hold a hand in a wide number of licenses. (This was to bypass the fact that the
regulation only limited one entity to own more than 19% of three businesses, so many of these
groups held far less percent in a large number of social equity licenses.)
On the other hand, I hesitate to portray applicants as mere dupes of shark-like predators
descending on cannabis. Some Black and brown residents of social equity zip codes I spoke to
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believed they had little chance of survival in a changing market. Signing up on paper for a role
that they would have no real authority did have short term gain. Depending on the company,
some were offering anywhere from five to one hundred thousand for a partner. Even some of the
more established people I spoke to were blithe about the prospects. One 40-ish Black dispensary
owner seeking to transition to the legal market expressed his realistic assessment: “Its’ going to
come down to cashing out. In three, four, five years, when the corporate limits fall off, it’ll be
Marlboro, Corona, the tobacco and liquor companies. For $5 million I’ll sell my brand and take
care of my family for life.” This included, some Black, Latinx and API applicants shared, being
able to care siblings, parents, and others directly affected by arrest in the war on drugs or
working in low-wage sectors. While corporate investors had one plan, social equity applicants
were developing other strategies to maneuver the sharks and get at least the bare minimum of
reparations (or perhaps repair) this program had promised.
Other social equity applicants were sincerely engaged in attempts to co-construct a business
– but survival was still challenging. Small business creation is always slow going; the common
refrain in US small business financing is that the rates of failure are high and that it takes often
five or more years to turn a profit. Cannabis was dramatically more complex. Initial licensing
costs ranged from $10, 15 or 20,000 in Los Angeles. Councilmembers and DCR walked back
initial promises of fee waivers for social equity. Then came the entire restructuring of operations
necessary to survive the regulated market. Not only were businesses subject to an intensive set of
regulations governing everything from advertising to windows to security plans, they also had to
integrate their entire supply chain into a “seed to sale” statewide inventory control system. From
when a cannabis plant was developed in a nursery to its processing into flower or derivative
products like edibles and extracts, an RFID tag had to be attached, and all had to be processed
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via a relatively new online tracking system managed by the state and METRC, a privately-
contracted software company. Add to this the costs of commercial rent, which as noted in
Chapter 5, saw less fluctuations and more steady increase than housing, and you have a cash
“burn rate” – in financial terms – hotter than a California Fall wildfire.
Several investors and cannabis activists recognized these barriers, and banded together to
form loosely-termed incubators, meant to select and secure social equity applicants to participate
in (and sometimes, simply front) businesses. Incubator participants were offered participation at
times in a shared brand, and get support with obtaining capital, possibly shared land, and other
forms of technical assistance. UFCW Local 770 and several other partners had in fact lobbied the
city to form such an incubator as a public venture, similar to the public-private Green Tech
Incubator, but the city seemed unready to fully embrace this.
Probably one of the newest to the Los Angeles scene, one of the largest incubators that
secured dozens of licenses was headed by a Black transplant to Los Angeles. His familial wealth
came from a McDonalds and Wild Wings franchises across the South, and he was providing
thousands in funding for a significant number of social equity applicants with an emphasis on
expanding business ownership (in a more traditional sense, and almost as franchisees). One of
the most unique, and perhaps most closely aligned with a comprehensive vision of repair, was
the People’s Dispensary group from the Bay Area. They espoused an explicit abolitionist mission
and who was specializing in taking non-accredited small investors, doing presentations to secure
these funds through progressive and professional Black and brown Hollywood networks, while
ensuring an employee-managed local investment fund and local rent subsidies.
If it was not clear, the full implementation of adult-use market regulations, a.k.a, the opening
of recreational cannabis, opened the floodgates to a diversity of arrangements, strategies,
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schemes and speculation from a range of vantage points. The hope of creating a market-based
solution that could advance reparations for mass incarceration and deeper inequities was
especially contradictory because it meant dragging cannabis more fully into the regulated,
settler-speculative wealth-dominated economy. Policymakers and some advocates hesitated to
touch upon some of the sacred cows of neoliberal racial capitalism at that moment in Los
Angeles by providing solutions that would give social equity applicants a genuine ability to
survive without having to turn to predation – direct payments to equity applicants, public
banking, restrictions or caps on commercial rent, and a non-punitive approach to licensing were
briefly attempted, but then slowly pushed off the table via behind-the-scenes lobbying.
Carlos, an ambitious 30-year old proud-Mexicano I met at the Watts Labor Center event,
exemplified the challenges in realizing the stated promise of social equity to include those
affected by the war on drugs. He spoke passionately at the Watts hearing about devastating
experiences seeing his single mother arrested for trying to make meager additional income from
cannabis to support her family. In the third grade at the time, he then had to help take care of his
baby sister as they moved through foster care, jumping from home to home across South Central,
East Los Angeles and the Valley.
Carlos explained he was obsessed with pursuing business and real estate management to be
able to care for his family – seeing how this offered wealth when he moved to live with a relative
in the San Fernando Valley in high school. He also spoke of the role cannabis played in his own
life coping with long-term trauma, he also developed a passion for the cannabis plant, learning
home cultivation, and becoming an advocate to see social equity enshrined in cannabis
regulation. Like many young men in Los Angeles, he had numerous run-ins with police unrelated
to cannabis, which had foreclosed other opportunities, including financial aid for college.
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From the time we met in Watts to the time I wrote this dissertation was being finalized,
Carlos fought with determination to secure a location and find investors to build a dispensary,
that he hoped would help support his mom. He moved through three locations – one in Highland
Park (taken by one of his investors), one in South Central (taken by another investor), and
landing on one in Echo Park where the rent was scheduled to reach $9,500 for a relatively small
storefront. He also had to work through five different investors – Felix, an Armenian real estate
agent; Carleton, an upper middle-class Black corporate insurance manager; Raj and Sumita, two
different South Asian small landlords and then his new wife’s Russian father, who obtained
wealth overseas in import-export businesses. I enumerate these because they represented a class
of upper/upper-middle class residents in Los Angeles whose wealth was significant but insecure,
speaking to the nature of turbulent 21
st
Century US urban capitalism. Carleton, for example,
proved highly cautious and ultimately distrustful, believing the smart but often outspoken social
equity applicant was too risky a bet for his life savings. Sumita lost all her wealth in a divorce
during the time she was working with Carlos.
Where did Carlos find such figures? There were numerous spaces where social equity
applicants could encounter an investor, or an investor could recruit applicants – these included
cannabis policy briefings, networking events, advocacy meetings, cannabis industry conferences,
even the city council hearings on cannabis. At some events, investors would pose false questions
starting with phrases such as, “I’m a real estate developer looking to invest in a cannabis
company, and I wanted to know about,” followed by a general, already-answered query. The real
point was to fish out interested applicants with some cannabis knowledge (not dissimilar from
the academic and activist practice of offering a question at a conference that is actually self-
promotion or a rant). It was hard to know who to trust as so many adopted the language of
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equity, and some attorneys and consultants who were supposed to be supporting applicants were
actually just brokering deals favorable to investors for a premium.
At time of writing, Carlos was burning out. He taken more of a backseat role in trying to
start a cannabis dispensary, allying himself with Maria, a young single Latina who had grown up
in South Central and who wanted to start a business to support her father and mother. The latter’s
precarious construction and daycare were stuttering during the COVID-19 pandemic. (She had
never been arrested or directly impacted, unlike Carlos, but he met her at a social equity event
and thought she might be a good leader for the project.) Finding relatively trustworthy attorneys
and technical assistance – a tough call in a field where some were charging upwards of $20,000
to $30,000 for an application – they faced a challenging licensing application process when it
finally opened to the public in November 2019 (two years after the legal market launch). The
DCR’s online system to qualify for a social equity license required being among the first 100
submit a social equity application on the day it was released. After months of debate, the city
settled on first-come, first-serve to avoid either a lottery or points-based merit system, both of
which were (as evidence from other cities was showing) susceptible to lawsuits.
Since Maria was going to be the main “51%” owner first had to be “pre-screened” by
proving long-term residency in the above-noted zip code maps, or to have a California cannabis
conviction. Then, on the day the online application opened, Maria and hundreds of others would
have mere minutes, it turned out, to “type faster than you ever typed in your life,” she joked. The
first one hundred applications were in under two minutes, and more than a thousand followed. A
complete application included an uploaded location map, a list of all investors and loans for the
company, an operating agreement and several other basic documents. Catching wind of the vast
number of schemes taking shape, the City instituted new paperwork to prevent non-social equity
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investors – often shorthanded in conversations as “the 49%” - from utilizing predatory practices
such as onerous loans or a limit on the social equity applicant’s (“the 51%’s”) role to wrest
control of the business. (As I soon learned, this hurdle was easily overcome by “legal” corporate
investors who were used to hiding their involvement in different ventures, and their control – not
to mention the fact many of the DCR staff and even social equity researchers like myself were
unfamiliar with how to look for very subtle levers of power in operating agreements.). The
licensing application requirements cemented another roadblock: property. Without the lease and
landlord approval, one could not prove adherence to the strict location restrictions, so locations
had to be ready – and in many ways, being paid for, to be able to apply.
Maria and Carlos, though, did get that gold(en ticket), to perhaps even their surprise. While
they came in near number 140 (at literally 9:02am), a group of industry organizations filed a
lawsuit, claiming the computer system was rigged to allow early access to some. The public
records released showed a timestamp of several minutes before the start time, but the real
evidence that kept being reiterated was that the first few applicants had Armenian surnames.
DCR, uninterested in a long and drawn out legal battle, set off compromise to release an
additional 100 licenses to those who had applied. Tonya made the cut, as did Maria and Carlos.
Even with the ticket in their hands, the investors kept dropping in and out when they found
that they couldn’t either make money fast enough or hold enough power. Most offers on the table
either asked for extremely large rates of return or interest on their capital investment, or control
over the business. It increasingly seemed like the only way Maria and Carlos could take
advantage and find much-need capital to pay rent at their Echo Park location was to relinquish
control of their budding enterprise. At time of writing, they were literally in limbo. With a pitch
deck in hand, they prepared to offer a last ditch attempt to secure funds from an expanding
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investment group tied to a multi-state operator. The investors was giving them one shot: show
me your financial models, and if I think what you’re doing is interesting, I’ll fund you without
taking control. If I don’t like your model, I can offer you capital at a low rate of interest but you
will basically adopt the brand and model we offer, and become little more than a franchise. The
final option? Buy Carlos out, and place Maria in a symbolic, salaried position. “I could support
my mom finally, buy her and my grandmother a place in Mexico, let them live in peace,” he
wondered out loud.
Even five years in to fighting for a license, Carlos was relatively new to the formalized
industry (having done more work in the casual underground sales and home-grow). Pablo’s story
offers a glimpse into how some “legacy operators” were interpreting the changes, and how long-
time cannabis workers too became entangled in these processes. In his early 40s, he was born in
Mexico and could not actually own the business due to restrictions on licensing; he placed it in
his wife’s name. Fifteen years into the industry, he had established one of the first Latinx-owned
dispensaries in Los Angeles in the South Bay, which had unionized during the medical marijuana
period.
In 2019, he sought to expand his chain of businesses and support a new social equity
applicant. The “sensitive use” restrictions had, as note, squeezed the number of available
locations to a tight few. (Add to that the significant LA challenge of “finding a spot with good
parking,” Pablo laughed, “impossible!”) Pablo allied with a young social equity applicant, a
former employee from his other dispensary, and they hit the jackpot. Due to, as he said “fast
internet and a quick typer,” he came in at number 97 in the first social equity pool.
Even with a thriving additional dispensary, he could not secure enough cash to start up, and
had to scramble a pool of investors to support the expansion. Established businesses like Pablo
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received regular direct calls from investors seeking to purchase a stake in his existing license for
millions. When we spoke, even with the good news that Pablo both obtained additional funds,
the project was under threat. The main social equity ally-applicant had begun to use “serious
drugs” based on the initial money Pablo gave him, and Pablo was looking to find ways to replace
him with another employee of his. As he waiting for licensing to be processed, he was paying
nearly $10,000 a month to keep a location, even as the finalized licensing and inspections were
taking nearly a year. One could understand the frustration mounting in others like Tonya who
sought to open a business, putting forward hundreds of thousands in costs before the enterprise
had even publicly launched. (Of course, several I spoke to had returned to small, unregulated
delivery enterprises to gain cash in the meanwhile.) At the same time, one could also see how the
social equity applicant supposedly caught up in drugs had simply embraced the prospects for
momentary repair, and was going to take what he could in a situation where he had little control.
Meanwhile, Pablo’s existing dispensary was thriving but still operating without major
profits – at least not comparable to the medical marijuana period. “People don’t expect is the
margins,” Pablo lamented. He enumerated the new ways which steep costs accumulated in
cannabis: rent, labor costs for long hours, security costs for round-the-clock presence, complex
point-of-sales tracking. All added up quickly. Particularly stark were the high rates of federal
taxes, which, because of the legal status of cannabis and the Internal Revenue Service’s rule
280e that those in the industry dreaded, did not allow businesses to write off their “costs of
goods.”
Los Angeles’s legal supply chain solidified in ways that increased the number of actors
attempting to accrue value from the industry, even beyond those directly entering or seeking a
license. Some of these actors were already part of the story, like commercial landlords and police
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agencies. The latter were now not only still raiding shops, but were the primary beneficiaries of
the large sums of municipal taxes given that these were earmarked only for the general fund,
which LAPD has all but controlled. The former were able to charge even higher premiums
because the locations available were narrow, and many applicants were on razor-thin timeframes
to meet the requirements of the application processes. New to the story were a range of actors
promising to help navigate the local and state licensing process, most notably legal and
compliance attorneys (or simply consultants), security companies, insurance providers,
marketing agencies, web designers targeting cannabis, and other professional-class mediators to
the “legal” market. In 2019 and 2020, new online actors were even systematically going to new
cannabis websites, checking for compliance to certain standards regarding disability, and filing
lawsuits to rake in some of that cannabis-cash.
In the hot, long summer on 2018, when the roll out of initial licensing and social equity was
just barely crawling to a start, Janet and I sat in an Inglewood coffee shop to meet with a larger-
scale unlicensed operators in the city, or at the least, one of the more networked, Jerome. The sun
had taken a break from record heat, and we were just comfortable enough umbrellas; it was on a
hill and I could see just far enough down some streets that I thought I caught a glimpse of where
I grew up. Everyone talked through sunglasses, but it felt like a hopeful moment.
Janet organized the meeting because, as she said, she was tired of “crabs in the barrel shit.”
Wanting to bypass much of the coalitional politics, she wanted to take action to reach the people
social equity was first intended and imagined (at least as far as I understood watching the
process): the many underground operators who had faced jail time in communities of color, who
might actually want to start a shop and who would be probably very successful, considering they
knew the trade inside and out. I had offered to help link her to know-your-rights training for
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workers, and we both wanted to learn what it would take to reach fugitive groups to let them
know about social equity licensing opportunities.
That fugitivity may have been exactly what we did not fully account. Jerome was affable,
and warm. He laughed frequently, except for the moments where he talked about how much the
social equity advocates that he knew were mostly, in his eyes, “full of shit.” (“I know everyone
in this business, and we all know each other, I’ll tell you what some of these people are really
about” he cautioned.) As excited as we were to figure out how to get the word out and perhaps
put on some free legal clinics to help fill out the basic qualification forms, he also thought we
were all, frankly, a bit delusional. He took us through it: “You tell me: Why register yourself, as
a Black cannabis operator who had not had a record yet - or maybe you did – and just hand over
your info to the police, to the government?” Even further, why bother with such a system when
the entire legal contract system was illegitimate, built on broken treaties with indigenous tribes
and enslavement? When you put it that way, refusal to be recognized made plenty of sense.
Jerome was not far off from reality, either. In areas like Humboldt, in Northern California,
cannabis cultivation and retail licensing had already opened and the applicants were a trickle.
Few people stood up to suddenly identify themselves. When cultivation licenses finally opened
up in mid-2018, which had far less numerical limits and included social equity prioritization,
applications did not by any means match the scope of the indoor industry. (This has changed to
some degree over time, thanks to some deliberate work on the part of Packer and DCR.)
To Jerome, those truly committed to cannabis as a fugitive phenomenon (with roots in the
Black community and beyond it) and an economy were already far moved on to the next phase,
to the world of hemp production, making clothes, soaps, other small products. Some turned to
online cannabis spaces to promote “delivery,” others went back to growing for themselves and
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close friends in closets. Yes, the unlicensed dispensaries of the whack-a-mole kind were still
there, but he suggested many were just fronts to sell surplus products for some licensed shops.
“The real underground cats are long gone, they are already making something new.” (Some were
also applicants who could not wait any longer and needed to make rent as licensing rolled out.)
He had even less kind words for those who stayed in the business these last years and had no
problem calling the police on other shop-owners they labelled as “rogue shops” and “burnt all
the bridges.” His original commitment to cannabis had been to move people he knew from
selling harder drugs and stop related arms’ races in the 1990s; in his eyes, he had accomplished
his goal to “protect communities,” and he could best continue this effort off-the-grid.
When one considers the terrain of challenges faced by social equity applicants, it’s not hard
to understand why Jerome was not even going to bother, and why so many were adjusting their
expectations – in blunt terms – to get what they could where they could. The ideal equity
scenario written into law did not exist: few underground applicants had either the resources to
make the jump with no additional supports, or on the other hand, even saw it possible to align
with the legalized market. Doing so involved submitting oneself to a host of additional actors
who were here to tell you how you were supposed to behave in this changing market, and to
accumulate value through your long-held labor, science, care, and culture. You would have to be
groomed for a commodified market – and it would come at a steep price (not to mention, you
were now paying taxes to fund the same police that advanced the war on drugs in the first place).
Viewing Jerome, Maria, Carlos, Pablo, Tonya and others together, it’s clear the host of
positions towards what it meant to actually rectify the harms of the war on drugs and racial
inequality. The diversity of actors affected by the war on drugs in one form of the other entering
or remaining in the industry post-legalization, helps expand upon Lewis’ understandings of
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repair versus reparations (2020). In this case, the differences among liberal projects of
reparations and momentary acts of (postcolonial) repair appears more like a spectrum than a
divide. On one end were those striving to obtain a “gold standard” (in Carlos’ words) of social
equity – an applicant harmed by the war on drugs, who builds a business from scratch and is able
to do so in a way that benefits their household, their employees, and the local community. Those
might turn to the host of different consultants and agencies meant to help you transition, but
ideally it could happen with far less costs and far more to re-invest. On the farthest end, a version
of immediate repair – deals signing off one’s name, or even remaining, as Jerome suggested, in
the fugitive market. Somewhere in the middle were those who were comfortable with continuing
the war on drugs in another form, and with embracing free market competitiveness to be able to
develop their social equity businesses, or even those Black and brown professionals who were
not entangled in mass incarceration but generally had the capital or knowledge to make this a
project of self-determination for their communities.
I lay out this spectrum of repair and reparations not as a judgement on who was a “true”
social equity applicant, but to make sense of how social equity as a whole project of
transforming the harm of the war on drugs faced tremendous obstacles from the start and through
its development. Hampered with a small budget (since the City Council did not even guarantee
any portion of the cannabis tax funds to regulatory operations), the Department of Cannabis
Regulation struggled to launch any number of support programs like technical assistance and
small grants meant to at least mitigate some of these high costs and hard-to-understand or
misleading information to obtain licensing. The claims by some social equity advocates that the
program had been purposefully hamstringed in such a way that failure was guaranteed (then
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allowing free market corporate interests reigned) seemed less like conspiracy and more a
sobering analysis of a poorly-funded but ambitious policy.
But the real obstacles to social equity were deeper than that – they had much more to do
with, among other factors noted above such as real estate extraction, the lack of recognition of
just what cannabis had represented and brought to participants as a fugitive project, and how
such a process – along with broader carceral realities – had imbued a lack of trust in the state and
its projects. Social equity policymakers and advocates also did not account for just how much
being a fugitive project in fact protected cannabis actors from a wide range of legal predatory
practices and siphons of value that were making cannabis less and less viable for actors with
little resources or expertise in navigating regulatory, market and financial complexity. There may
have been barriers to preventing some actors direct licensing, but there were far too many
loopholes built into the very fabric of the financialized racial capitalist order and its spatial
manifestations in LA - far too many actors beyond the equity circles and zip codes even seeking
to tap into the promise of quick returns in cannabis. Social equity felt for so many I spoke to like
death by a thousand tiny cuts, so positioning and strategizing oneself along these spectrum of
repair and reparations was a means to stop the bleeding and hold on to what you could.
The Capitalist and the Commodity
Some venture capitalist and corporate actors quite brazenly walked in through the loopholes
and contradictions in California and LA’s regulation – and their maneuverings were not only
harming the prospect of equity, they threatened to undermine hard-fought gains in labor rights
and to render cannabis even more quickly yet another low-wage service sector . In a matter of
months leading up to January 2018, several large Proposition D-sanctioned shops were
subsumed by a new breed of what would soon be called “multi-state operators,” or MSOs. The
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very first official license holder in LA, in fact, was a MedMen store in downtown Los Angeles.
The company had gained particular notoriety for its rapid expansion and its brash CEO, a young
white man named Adam Bierman. A venture capitalist (who, in full disclosure spent some time
at the University of Southern California) had a reputation for over-the-top statements about the
future of cannabis and the “lack of sophistication” of most other operators, and as lawsuits would
confirm, a virulent racist, sexist and homophobic persona not far from that of Uber’s CEO,
worthy of the characterizations of venture-tech bros in films like Sorry to Bother You (2018).
While Bierman had only owned a dispensary in the wealthy enclave of Marina Del Rey for a
short time, he spent most of his time in the industry building a company “brand,” MedMen, that
he would then utilize to purchase licenses. His first was a West Hollywood shop, a lucrative
license holder that had been inundated by far too many raids. Bierman eschewed participating in
the broader organizing networks, the kind of back-room camaraderie and (occasionally smoke-
filled) exchanges of knowledge and political coordination that Athena and Arik described.
Journalists both within and beyond the cannabis industry turned to the example of the first
MedMen shops as the changing face of cannabis. Dubbed the “Mac store of weed,” the shops
featured a full glass storefront to supposedly break down stigmas and show they were doing
something different (though this is due in part to the fact that, prior, limited immunity shops had
to have tinted windows). Inside, glossy hardwood floors and walls curved into slick long tables
filled with iPads to select product, with a minimal touch approach to customer service and in
medical patient care.
MedMen soon snapped up several prominent dispensaries within the City of Los Angeles
proper. They evaded the limits on holding one retail license set by the state meant to stop
consolidated corporate ownership and retain small business diversity. MedMen’s claim was that
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they were only providing operations support and marketing as a “management company,”
franchising the brand, versus owning the licensed operations directly. Much like the argument
McDonald’s has made to counter minimum wage laws by disavowing power over franchisees,
MedMen created a convenient architecture to skirt the laws; at the same time, it was structured to
raise significant speculative capital based on a projected massive multi-state operation.
When the company’s management team took over several unionized dispensaries as part of
its venture into the city of LA, a clash was clear. Interviewees describe a concerted effort by new
managers to push out the original employees of the shops. Many I spoke to suspected the push-
out tactics were in part to impose the new vision of commercialized cannabis, and in part to
undermine an upcoming vote to re-authorize the union with the new leadership.
In the time between the Proposition D win in 2013 and the 2018 launch of adult-use, the
union had spent significant time trying to seize upon the neutrality agreements it secured with a
large number of operators. With fluctuations in the industry, they were still able to secure nearly
two dozen contracts with dispensaries, and regular presence at several others – a few of whom
became MedMen shops. While there were at least 70 neutrality agreements, organizers knew
licensing was changing hands. They would keep doing so, and chose to also significant energy to
trying to shape the regulatory process, both for the sake of general worker protections and for
social equity specifically. That strategy to focus on policy and larger-level organizing had its
benefits: Unions won a key provision in both state and LA’s regulation mandating that any shop
that had more than 10 employees in Los Angeles (or 20 at the state) produce a labor-peace
agreement (LPA) agreement pledging non-interference in unionization campaigns (in trade off
for a no-strike clause). The LPA model had been utilized in one of the defining community-labor
wins of the early 21
st
century, the living wage campaign centered at the LAX airport, and
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replicated in other “community benefit agreements” nationwide (Parks and Warren 2009). In
another transformative win, the union helped install a ban in the state and local regulation on
independent contractors in front-line “plant-touching” work – all but stopping another would-be
“gig economy” company from establishing a contingent worker platform.
Several of the dispensaries that MedMen took control over were unionized under prior
neutrality and poised to do the same when the “new” adult-use business would vote regarding re-
certifying the union. New and fresh MedMen-installed managers, one employee
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shared, were
forward about their disdain for the union. Several employees, active union leaders, were fired.
Long-time employees suddenly found themselves subject to a punitive “call-out” warning
system that would put a worker up for termination after three such incidences, and new managers
were quick to dole these out. (“There were no written records of this, though, you just had to take
their word for it,” an employee explained.) These tactics also avoided arbitration via the union,
taking advantage of the in-between from the legal market’s opening and new union certification
as part of the re-licensed shops. As the relations among owners, managers and employees
frayed, other employees left voluntarily: “One dude, he was a mechanic,” another MedMen
employee shared. “He worked there on top of his job because it was his social life, his moment,
his community. When MedMen took over, he quit, saying ‘Fuck this, I am not even making
most of my money off this, there’s nothing worth it here.”
The company was literally trying to take apart the physical infrastructure and memory of the
collective space and install a whole different set of relationships mediated by the iPads, glass
windows, and plexi-wood paneling. As the walls came down, employees were expected to

50
Due to the sensitivity of the claims made here, and MedMen’s tendency to retaliate against employees, employee
psuedonyms are removed completely here. To note, these workers represented Black and Latinx women and men,
and were active in the industry at least 1 year prior to the takeover. Most of them were in their mid-20s at the time
and had at least 3 plus years under their belt.
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maintain operations leading into the January 2018 re-launch. One shared, “Not going to lie, that
transition was some of the most exhausting time of my life. They kept the store open during
construction. Several of us got hurt, and they tried to push it off so they wouldn’t pay worker’s
[compensation]…For some of the time, we didn’t have a roof; it was all exposed insulation, wind
and dust, and we had to fight, using the union, to get masks and deal with the 100 degree heat.”
While managerial relationships varied across the board, these specific shops purchased by
MedMen were known for some of the tighter and more positive relation prior to being sold and
co-opted into the new management company . Store hierarchy expanded into a wider web of
human resource managers, multiple corporate marketing teams, and other middle management
and corporate intermediaries who constantly visited stores to assess compliance or deliver a new
initiative – and made substantively more than front-line employees who actually drove profit.
One West Hollywood worker shared:
“I think the biggest problem is the disconnect between people on the corporate side and
people on the actual inside of the stores, the people running the shops. These corporate
people – not all, but I think a lot of them don’t have any experience in the cannabis industry.
They have experience in how to make a corporation more money, and I feel and see it going
further away from the fundamental root of the cannabis culture, and just going more into this
corporate greed, and I’m not about that.”

In order to dilute the core of long-time workers, the company held mass hiring fairs before
the launch of the legal adult-use market in California in January 2018 and brought in dozens of
young new, low-wage workers. (Volume was also expected to surge, since there were so few
license-holders ready to launch.) It turned out that there was something to the relational
knowledge and labor practices that many medical marijuana employees held. During visits to
worksites those first months of adult-use, I watched as some newer workers stood blankly out on
the floor and did not seem to see the curious customers struggling with the technology or with
the cannabis encapsulated in small, locked jars with perforated holes on tables. The work had not
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been downgraded even to emotional labor with a fake smile; it had just become mechanical,
technical, and timed order filling, like a live Amazon warehouse, with everyone given identical
red shirts (cf. Williams and Connell 2010). (In fact, several workers went from generative work
on the floor with patients to being relegated to a whole team charged in back-room fulfillment
duties, mediating between the basement storage rooms and a second staging area where orders
sent by the store iPads were filled.)
Sales fluctuated wildly; the company imposed steep targets that, as an employee noted,
“didn’t even come with commission – we were just expected to deliver.” As irrational quotas
were not met, dozens of the new employees were then fired en masse; in some months more than
30 to 40 were fired. “Guess you can’t just take a bunch of underpaid workers from Baby Gap and
stick them in a cannabis dispensary and get what you want,” one employee laughed. Several
veterans ended up returning, at the suggestion of the union, during the reshuffling.
To the defense of fired workers, another employee mentioned that training was minimal.
Quite a few, according to interlocutors, came from failing retail fashion establishments. In the
new on-boarding, they noted, “most of the time was spent talking about loss control and listing
all the penalties for stealing.” Workers were treated as suspected parasites of value rather than
being recognized as generating it. Surveillance cameras and a constant loss accounting (that
often came due to inventory processing problems) created an atmosphere of suspicion not too far
from the shop experience that Adriana and others described, or common in US retail stores.
Many articulated a frustration with the hollowing of the relationship with clients. Others
expressed anger after learning some of the fired workers, including a couple with a child, now
forced to live in their car, suddenly unable to afford the high costs of LA rent. The ways in which
new layers of management and shareholders were siphoning value – leaving less and less money
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for workers – was spurring a frustration rife for labor organizing. The contradiction was clear,
especially as MedMen’s highly-paid new public relations team touted how its rounds of
investment were raking in millions.
Attempting to incorporate new technologies, MedMen set up a point-of-sale system that
accepted debit and credit transactions (through a workaround that did not charge through banks
directly). Six months after opening, realizing corporate engineers had failed to account for the
taxation of tips, they found a massive tax bill on their hands and attempted to take the charge out
on employees retroactively. Suddenly, many workers saw their paychecks cut drastically – and
some workers received no check at all due to the tip taxation. Staff ignited a set of walkouts and
actions even before the union could step in; their union representative supported building a
campaign, and they were able to restore all lost wages in weeks.
Despite the best efforts of the corporation, and even with their skirting of any real neutrality,
the union reauthorization campaign at the acquired stores was a success. The victory was
followed by an intensive organizing drive to unionize the remaining non-union MedMen stores
in the network. After weeks of 12-hour days for the union’s cannabis organizing team composed
of both workers from other stores and paid organizing staff, the campaign was a massive success.
According to organizers, the newer, smaller stores included many elite young workers who did
not imagine themselves as low-wage workers but simply “learning the trade to go start their own
brand.” But their co-workers from other stores made the case, and UFCW Local 770 swept its
elections across the entire chain. With UFCW local victories in other cities in California, the first
large MSO was coming quickly to becoming a union shop. The loophole created for capitalist
profit was turned on its head into a means to create a statewide and possibly, nationwide contract
covering hundreds of cannabis employees.
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The fight did not end there, of course. “Bargaining changed: we had some good faith
bargaining before, a fair consistent mentality. All of a sudden, with some new owners it was a
fight for everything,” Dolores explained. After yet another extensive process, the contract,
according to several worker interviewees, did represent a significant bump in pay, and included
health insurance access for the first time. For some workers who were unhappy with the loss of
some of the core elements of their work, the pay was enough to keep them holding on for the
time being. They also pushed for more interaction on the shop floor, and quickly re-integrated
elements of past practice. They quickly seemed to grasp they had cut off a central mechanism for
accruing value through deep interaction, community affinities and (fugitive) care, though they
did not make many shifts to training to respond to this.
At the same time, a new base of mostly-elite global customers was emerging. “Tourists, so
many tourists,” Valeria lamented, from anywhere: Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America.
Another Medmen employee shared how the company would invite news stations from Asia to
feature the store, and they would get “tourist straight from the airport” who would spend nearly
thousands in one transaction. “They heard it was a safe shop.”
The company also launched a “new normal campaign,” exemplified by a stylized two-
minute trailer made by US filmmaker Spike Jonze that condensed the history of US cannabis into
a story starting with George Washington’s hemp farm and enslaved people, mentioning the war
on drugs (and Nixon), and closing out with an interracial couple in the suburbs. This was
preceded by a series of massive ads with the large word “Stoner” crossed out, replaced above by
titles like “Designer,” “Coach,” or (Police) “Officer,” depicting mostly white women in these
roles. The marketing seemed to have some success, as another employee explained. “They
basically told us they want wealthy middle age white people who will spend two to three
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hundred dollars a visit. They are not for the one who is coming in for a 10 dollar gram. We don’t
even have a 10 dollar gram.” He then lamented the loss of un-housed and neighborhood clients.
No longer were patients coming from “as far as Lancaster” to connect and get flower. Cannabis’
status as racialized commodity was slowly shifting, and MedMen was in many ways accepting
this past imaginary and simply asserting that now, cannabis was safe because cannabis was
white. Cannabis was, in some ways, gentrifying.
Such a fundamental retail shift was reverberating across the supply chain, and with it,
reshaping the commodity itself – as noted to some extent in Chapter 4’s analysis of CBD. The
first officially branded cultivators and manufacturers started to drop strain names, replaced
instead by products that were listed by certain experiences: “Sleep,” “Calm,” “Relief.” Many of
these were “vape pens” that burned extracted cannabis liquids (meant to help disappear the
flower itself from visibility, and thus policing) were growing more popular. Several health panics
about vapes surfaced in late 2019, first targeting cannabis as the problem itself; as it turned out,
the culprit was cheap Vitamin E additives being mixed in to both these and nicotine based e-
cigarettes. Many poisonous vapes were coming from the legal market, and the additives (meant
to extend the time a vape could be smoked, diluting the product) were not breaking down
properly with the extracted THC (Norcia 2019). After years of underground extraction
techniques and fears drummed up by police agencies of exploding butane machines, it was the
legal market production that was literally killing people.
Mariana shared her distrust of the shifting commodity relations:
“People are coming out with these new words and verbiage, bypassing what growers
say or what we have to say about what’s really medicinal, or what these plants mean…I feel
a conflict, telling people how it should feel, versus – you smoke this and tell me how you
should feel. I don’t know who’s really running it and who has the money, and what they are
trying to control by limiting this experience. You are dictating something so deep for a
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human; weed is something that crosses boundaries for people, it shouldn’t be contained like
this.”

Mariana’s critique hit many points, but most relevantly to this analysis, to a limiting of the
kind of co-constitutive experience that many shared among patients/budtenders and the plant.
Much of the ability to be openly “affected” by cannabis and to constitute collective knowledge of
cannabis was increasingly mediated by one-directional marketing (Graham and Roelvink 2010).
There were of course, signs and signals of past practice in this arena too, including some
cultivators returning to old strain names and embracing the unpredictable.
Speaking of unpredictable and capitalist follies, issues multiplied for MedMen at a broader
level. It turned out that much of what was sustaining the company was reflective, like the real
estate market, of debt, financialization and speculation. Across several years of building the
“brand,” Bierman and company exercised almost every kind of contemporary speculative
capitalist strategy to raise funds, mirroring the numerous “sharing economy” apps - similarly
disavowing certain responsibility for the operations upon which it profited. This included listing
itself on the Canadian stock exchange (since US stock markets still banned cannabis) using a
reverse-stock takeover by a public company to bypass the process of listing. The company – like
several other new operators emerging in the country – used the stock release to raise significant
capital, using a predicted valuation of $1.65 billion (Kaplan 2017).
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Stock prices did not hold, and MedMen, by mid-2019, was desperately seeking $100-million
dollar credit lines as it had, in the language of business news, “burned cash” (Berenson 2019) A
year later, during the COVID-19 crisis, revelations of financial mismanagement showed that the

51
Another MSO included Acreage Ltd, a cultivation holdings company whose board included former Republican
Speaker of the US House of Representatives John Boehner from Ohio, a company with little California presence.
This company also had an extremely inflated valuation and attempted a failed merge with the third major MSO
based in Canada, that ultimately failed (Burns 2019; House 400AD).
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common excuse given by business-friendly news outlets like Forbes and CNBC, that high taxes
and regulations were making canna-business unsustainable, was not even close to the truth. It
turns out that both investor capital and cash from transactions went to “multi-million dollar
homes and round-the-clock security allegedly paid for with investor capital, six-figure jobs for
people who didn’t seem to do anything” and other phantasms of contemporary trillionaire
capitalism (Roberts 2020). Several key lawsuits revealed venomous racist language from
Bierman against City Council President Herb Wesson – a Council that had actually protected the
company from being broken apart by instituting a management company cap of five licenses in
the city. Once again, mainstream news media – and new corporate cannabis industry voices -
where willing to mask the culpability of mostly-white investors that facilitated Bierman’s ascent.
(For example, from Forbes (Roberts 2020): “[MedMen] played on the naivety of the venture
capital world,” said Nate Bradley, a former California cannabis industry lobbyist and former
executive director of the California Cannabis Industry Association.”) The white innocence of
global capital was intact. The culprit, per quite a few corporate media articles?: “Cannabis
culture,” more specifically “the fly-by-night” attitude and “criminality of Southern California
cannabis” that Bierman had somehow absorbed (Berenson 2019; Schreckinger and Zhang 2020)
In the end, MedMen was operating like many other venture startup companies – with no real
regard to long-term profitability, but facilitating rapid, temporary profits among hedge funds,
wealthy venture capitalists, and other mostly-white elites, through stock valuations and other
financial mechanisms (MacBride 2020). Considering the failure of several multi-state ventures
and stalled stock launches (no matter how much money was thrown in by venture capitalists), it
is possible that multiple levels of relational politics – from the shop floor solidarities to key labor
and community interventions - and the very materiality of the plant and its production made the
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cannabis economy harder to convert into these kind of abstracted models of tech economics, or at
least expose their expected failure much faster. These struggles exposed a crucial
incommensurable source of value for workers that had accumulated through the union’s
organizing and their efforts to build relationship through fugitive circuits: power. And that was
not so easily taken away or replaced by a slick logo and an iPad.
The Big Prison Bed in the Room
“It’s funny, to have me and Mary carrying this around, when we never wanted to see a bed
like this again. Seven years of my life,” Selena tells me as she passes the joint to her left; we take
a deep breath as we hoist the rusted, metal frames of the prison bed onto the truck. It takes three
tries. The baseboards, thinner than those used to shore up drywall, rattle. They fit with room on
the back of the F-151, the car of choice of Los Angeles’ working class. American made upon
American made.
Mary peeks her head through the back of the truck window. “Imagine, being more than 5;4”
how are you gonna fit in this. I always felt bad, let them poke over onto my side.”
“I was always cool, you can, but it’s not going to be where my head is – you sleep the other
way around,” Selena laughs.
The joint makes another round. Mary, Black, also in her 40s, is a close friend of Selena’s,
who had met shortly after prison. “Then you had the ones who would make the girls who were
larger, who had trouble, take the top bunk. You felt so bad watching them struggle every day.”
Selena and Mary’s collective prison experience, the everyday cruelty of a carceral state, is
etched onto these heaps of metal, which had spent the day in the front entryway of a Los Angeles
warehouse. It was the kind of multi-purpose building layered representing a changing downtown
with garment sweatshops, photo and film locations, event spaces, and what may or may not have
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been a few grows squared away in a room or two. Having recently created a new more venture
known as the Social Impact Center, Selena and allies organized the Models of Justice event in
November 2018 to remind cannabis participants what they could learn from and how they could
build with other youth and adult abolition, queer and transgender, and racial justice movements.
Participants ranged widely in age, and it had a kind of exciting unpredictability that I had not felt
in a social movement event in a long time.
One could not walk around, bump into, experience the prison beds in the tiny entryway,
which was also alive with the scent of a single young cannabis plant borrowed from a local
marijuana cultivation facility. Selena had every intention of this physical interruption, to re-
inscribe a very different intimate politics: both the connection to the plant but also the ways in
which carceral histories could not be erased, even in the scramble over maps and licensing. Dia
de los Muertos-style ofrenda altars dedicated to those lost to mass incarceration, posters and
videos explaining the multiple properties of THC, tables mapped to promote conversation: all
were meant to ground a reckoning with the past (and present) and inspire more intersectional,
intergenerational engagement and politics.
While cannabis owner-operators were splintering into multiple networks, a newer, broader
coalition was forming beyond the industry, composed of groups that included a youth-led
abolitionist group, a transgender Latinx-identified activist organization, and several even smaller,
grassroots cannabis groups that represented the unhoused people, veterans, and even community
college-based students interested in hemp production. The SIC and UFCW Local 770 had helped
convene the groups, and following the event, the ad hoc coalition eventually jointly produced a
roadmap from the event on how to more comprehensively address equity and social justice in
cannabis policy going forward. (The report was presented on record to the LA City Council and
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can be found Appendix B). It was produced with support from the Department of Cannabis
Regulation, a way to help bring outside voices to support the kind of comprehensive shifts and
new programs that Packer and her young leadership team hoped to generate. The DCR helped
propose and the City Council passed some of the re-writes of social equity law to ensure more
transparency and to stem predatory practices, as well as to implement efforts to track and stop
punitive policies towards those under 21 found with marijuana.
The union, meanwhile, had been holding nearly monthly workshops starting in 2016 for
expungement of criminal records using both Prop 47 (the felony reclassification law from 2014)
and Prop 64, which, along with social equity organizing, proved to be one of the more popular
events with cannabis workers. These kind of programs were relatively unique for US organized
labor, which for the most part has not engaged fully into issues like criminal justice reform (with
some exceptions, of course). UFCW expungement clinics often linked the cannabis campaign
and young Black, indigenous and second generation Latinx and API workers to the broader,
predominantly-immigrant Latinx and to a lesser extent Black base of meatpacking and food
production workers. The grocery worker population cut across intergenerationally. Cannabis
workers helped lead the queer and transgender worker sub-group, one of the larger in the
country, that cut across these different racial and age demographics.
As the union deepened and expanded its involvement in cannabis, one could see how
cannabis workers were helping resurrect an explicitly queer coalitional politics in Los Angeles
that addressed policing - one signified by their massive Pride Parade float in 2017 that honored
both the unions’ workers and activists from the local Black Cat Tavern protests of 1967. The
actual protests preceded Stonewall as a major anti-police brutality LGBTQ event. But the events
around the Black Cat are even more obscured. The protests evolved into a coordinated series of
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events regarding police brutality in tandem with other civil rights-era movements – including in
the Black community of Watts and in the Latinx communities of East LA and Pacoima
(Hurewitz, 2008). The Black Cat’s history is far more familiar to the union workers, thanks to
the Pride Event and a large black and white poster from the original protests, reading “CRISIS!
POLICE LAWLESSNESS MUST BE STOPPED” that featured at the union office.
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In 2019, part of what was helping broaden the coalition assembled by Social Impact Center
and UFCW Local 770 from a wider swath of LA social movement organizations was the
question of community reinvestment of the tax dollars from cannabis. More unexpected partners
came to the table, including early education groups that saw the critical opportunity for
replenishing funding streams that, to that point, mostly came from a statewide settlement with
the tobacco lobby (Emerson 2018). Perhaps, more significantly, they had also broadened the
abolitionist horizons of the cannabis movement by more directly focusing in on the social
disinvestment tied to the drug war and policing since the 1970s. Activist organizations drew
specific attention to the ways in which police controlled nearly 85% of the general fund in that
2018-2019 budget cycle and chastised the hypocrisy of the LAPD’s willingness to take even
more money from cannabis (really, no different that civil asset seizure).
At first, success seemed assured. An early motion the union drafted, advanced by Harris-
Dawson was approved, which would move almost all cannabis tax income to a Neighborhood
Health Fund. This idea was crafted with reference to conceptualization of health equity that were
driving foundation-funded organizing in Los Angeles, that made clear how “downstream” health

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These latter histories of the broad-based nature of Los Angeles 1960s coalitional and radical activism have
recently been thoroughly explored by Mike Davis and Jon Weiner (2020). Such conjunctural moments of
interconnections were often re-animated in intergenerational events that both UFCW Local 770 and Social Impact
Center often explicitly sought to bring together, that would often include activists from across almost seven decades.
What was in particular about the LGBTQ leadership in both that did so? I suggest it is in part speaks to a kind of
queer kinship, especially among generations that have had been alienated from family or had to redefine its terms,
though this merits further exploration (DasGupta 2014).
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effects had to be traced to “upstream” issues like lack of job access and social services
(Braveman and Gruskin 2003; Cacari-Stone et al. 2014). Mass incarceration was consistently
named in studies as a driver of inequality, and this fund would be governed by community
members, including formerly-incarcerated people. It seemed to reflect key principles of equity
after much of the literature – including allowing those impacted to define the terms of equity,
setting a vision for collective community leadership and data collection to drive the process, and
executing it with attention to the impacts over time and continued input from community
(Benner and Pastor 2015; Carter, Pastor, and Wander 2018).
Yet the angel of history was waiting in the wings. As public attention turned to the fund, the
City Attorney released strict guidance that claimed that the motion could not move forward.
Representatives of the Attorney claimed the redirect constituted a new tax and contradicted
Proposition M (2017) that had planned that would assign these dollars to the general fund. DCR
was also cut off from receiving any automatic funds from the cannabis taxes from this money. It
had to regularly apply for funds, including for the social equity programs, which besides the
licensing support was to include workforce development programming and training.
Organizers attempted to build a second coalition to then propose a ballot initiative. Across
both processes, much talk settled on the importance of highlighting youth development and early
childhood education, in part because of the impact of incarceration on households and in part
because of the groups in the coalition served youth. As one public relations consultant assisting
in the process mentioned, “You can’t say no to kids, right, whether you like pot or not?” Once
again, the political valence of children surfaced, in this case a hopeful back-door for recuperating
the damage of disinvestment. But even this image of childhood innocence could not win this
battle. After the City Attorney’s stonewalling, few could come to a consensus or gain enough
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backers within the Council to create any permanent funding for communities via cannabis. Due
to the spotlight cast by groups, DCR did received the $4 million amount activists fought for that
year, and a small set of funds was given towards youth development; these were momentary, and
subject to the whims of the next budget cycle. The police money went untouched.
To little surprise, the head of the City Attorney’s office, Mike Feuer, had received
significant support from the Police Protective League lobbying group in his prior runs (and at
time of writing, was already receiving funds for a future mayoral run); any significant threats to
the LAPD revenue was antithetical to the police lobbying arm (Reyes 2020).
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Once again, the
police proved themselves more than an extension of some elite outside voice like developers,
guardians and beneficiaries of a plantation economy. Police may have backed out, for the most
part, of the regulation of cannabis directly, but they did not want to cede the resources tied to it.
This points to the need to better understand the ways that, police institutions have created whole
circuits of labor, institutional and exchange relations. They have been more than willing to
transform the economy to their terms and governance to their broken-windows imagination - or
as Camp explains, whatever new insurgency it has imagined itself protecting against (cf. 2016).
Finding A Shared Language
In an important new contribution to academic conversation on cannabis, data scientist
Nima Veiseh points to the risks that come with cannabis’ further integration into an economy
where “greed is largely buried in complexity and systems, through administrative costs and
overhead,” what he calls “legitimized complexity” (2019:16). For many vocal and frustrated

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Further signs of an entrenched policing order, core cannabis-related members of the coalition had also failed to
convince DA Jackie Lacey to automatically expunge the thousands of cannabis records, something Northern
California DA’s had to done. This continued need to individually address expungement created a mountain of work,
and many of the grassroots cannabis organizations began joining regular Black Lives Matter-LA
#JackieLaceyMustGoprotests . (Lacey, fearing for her elected position, ultimately caved on this issue in February
2020, on the eve of a primary election.)
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cannabis business owners, the initial focus in hearing this assertion would be to turn to the state
and to the new favorite bogeyman of budding entrepreneurs and fugitive-turned-legal market
actors: taxes and other regulatory capture. But as I have sought to lay out in this chapter (and
Veiseh make clear), the kinds of legitimized complexity that collapse market systems are not
simply the state and its policing functions (cf. 2019). The legitimized forces of capital extraction
instead are far more market-based – from venture capitalists seeking quick valuations to investor
groups buried under layers of subsidiaries to the many other new layers of “professionals” and
managers who came to tell budtenders, cultivators and other fugitive actors what they were doing
wrong or how they needed their expertise to navigate regulation were extracting more than they
could ever offer. (Yet, for all these consultants claimed, many of the corporate predictions about
branding being essential were failing to materialize, as I will touch upon in the conclusion).
Unfortunately, some actors used a representational politics as cover for extracting from
communities of color and would-be-cannabis operators, opting for a more immediate politics of
repair and getting what you can, feeling the odds stacked against them.
Veiseh raises this point to suggest the need for better, more direct feedback loops and a
shared data language across a supply chain and better linking consumers to suppliers and
retailers. Ironically, many of these systems did exist in the fugitive market, which may have
helped it thrive, and accrue value. At this new juncture with rapid commodification, shared
language and data did in fact offer a potential counterweight to the greed, in the ways that both
recognize past relations but also to generate a shared understanding of reparations and a shared
vision defining equity. This can be a starting point for pushing back against extraction and
inequality. Benner and Pastor describe as key to regional equity through creating dynamic and
diverse epistemic communities (2015). The communities are characterized, among other factors,
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by bringing together an unlikely set of actors towards creating a shared vision. Mediated and
driven by data, these communities can then enact a shared agenda, even working through many
tough conversations and moments of real tension and agreement to grow an economy in a way
that also addresses inequality directly.
At key junctures in cannabis’ development in Los Angeles, epistemic communities towards
equity seemed possible, where during the ban, operators, the union, workers, more established
advocates, and patients came together on an agreement on how to organize to challenge the ban
through multiple tactics and created subsequent agreements allowing union neutrality, all while
many deepening networks that allowed them to expand the plant’s properties. Much of that
shared language focused on care, on medicine, on the plant, and drew from movements to help
advance cannabis on a path that expanded the market’s value through intimate relationships and
experimentation tied to different conceptualizations of medicine and pleasure.
The problem is – much of that has been treated as illegitimate and irrelevant to the market’s
newest iterations. In the wake of legalization, assembling a unitary conversation and sharing
information has been much harder, inflected by market competition and other tensions wrought
by continued policing of legal/illicit boundaries. Trust among actors was fraying under the
weight of heightened competition. Much of the aforementioned knowledge – while underpinning
the industry – was not afforded institutional legitimacy, and is still discounted by medical
professionals and viewed as irrelevant to the assumed directions cannabis was taking. While the
city created a container for such conversations through nearly two years of hearings, the actual
format privileged certain either politically-connected or vocal actors. Much of what the industry
should look like – for example, in terms of a privatized and commodified model and a narrow
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licensing – seemed already decided by the context. In this case, more unlikely partners like
Jerome did not have a place at the table, and questioned whether they should even be a table.
Coming together in a common language was increasingly challenging – with many new
actors trying to impose a particular way of articulating cannabis through the prisms of
financialization, marketing and other elements of more mainstream capitalist practice that were
further reading every interaction with a customer, every encounter or hit on social media, every
minute spent on the shop-floor through a calculation of profit. The shifting triangulations and
spatializations of racial categories, especially in relationship to displacement, and post-Prop 209
neutralizations also did not help find a common language at this equity table – though tools like
the equity maps were meant to do. Selena grew so frustrated by the elision of the violent, lived
experiences of mass incarceration and the celebration of profit that she brought that prison bed
front and center to the industry event – much as it felt in the lives of so many affected by carceral
systems, heavy, dragging, inevitable, scarring.
As federal legalization looms, if equity is to become a cornerstone of the national market,
then the panoply of actors amassed around the plant must come to a shared understanding and
language, and data both measuring harm and value. Such an approach should center the plant,
the people and the relationships that truly have defined the market – not obfuscates the human-
to-human and plant-to-human connections that have made the industry what it is today, nor
forget the ongoing context of mass incarceration. This will involve many tough conversations
and much work towards healing given the kinds of tensions and competition wrought by the
processes of legalizations, and even further, throughout decades of violent prohibition and
multiplying police power. There must be even more uncomfortable and honest conversations
about immediate gain and long-term sustainability, about repair versus reparations, about cashing
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in versus building something more – ones that, with the right data on ownership and investment,
can also make clear the less-visible circuits of power and capital entangling the industry.
Finding such a common repertoire again can perhaps help move further than spectrum of
immediate repair and limited liberal reparations and to achieving the kinds of self-determination
that has seemed to animate the frustrations and passions of so many drawn to cannabis. Finding
ways to – perhaps again through movements- ignite trust, sharing data and improving dialogue
could be step forward towards a more comprehensive vision of reparations expressed by Robin
Kelly – one long-fought for by Black movements centering “social justice, reconciliation,
reconstructing the internal life of Black America and eliminating institutional racism” and
ultimately perhaps, answering to continued displacement and endless raids by “securing the
funds to build autonomous Black institutions [and] improving community life” (2002:115).

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Conclusion: “I Ask Them to Remember”

“Where life is precious, life is precious.”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
“Is Prison Necessary?” New York Times Magazine. April 2019.

By the time the COVID-19 pandemic descended upon the US, cannabis was still in many
ways as much fugitive as it was formal in Los Angeles. The monetary value of the economy was
continuing to expand, and with it bring new consumers to the table. It’s hard to say though
whether it was in fact expanding any greater rate than its radical growth in the 2000s and 2010s,
especially regionally. But the faces at the table were looking different. Those occupying the most
visible seats were gaining from an entire architecture of care, knowledge and relationships built
in the shadows and that had turned cannabis into a site for rapid growth in the midst of crisis.
Workers and operators who created these systems were in a wide range of positions some
refused to cede to a state-regulated system, others were finding ways to hold together an
enterprise or stay employed in a union job, and quite a few gave up on cannabis altogether.
Cannabis had become enmeshed in entertainment, real estate, tech and small entrepreneurial
sectors, in complex multi-racial and class politics unique to Los Angeles. Many BIPOC
entrepreneurs and aspirants grappled with just how inevitable cannabis’ takeover by bigger
capitalist forces was, and whether it was worth fighting or cashing out.
Meanwhile, in the world of (mostly white, male) new cannabis “C-suites,” a new crop of
entrants were scratching their heads as data from the newest brands showed consumers failing to
respond in the ways expected. Slick new advertising campaigns, Instagram influencers, and all
the like were not matching the ways consumers old and new were approaching cannabis. While
entertainers were attaching their names to new brands, it was not paying off quickly. (In one
interlocutors’ words, “It turns out Jay-Z may be good at many things, but he doesn’t know good
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weed – and that’s the fastest way to lose clients.”) Many consumers shopped local - including
staying underground. Others sought out medical advice and continued to use alternative online
and in-person channels to share knowledge. Home-grows have persisted. It seemed some
customers remained tied to the deep relations they built, while others altogether uninterested in
much more than a quick and anonymous transaction to pick up the latest, brand-agnostic
gummies (the fastest growing product at the time of writing). This did not stop the C-suite class
and their investors and brokers from relentlessly pursuing new assets, seeking to find social
equity license-holders and community-brokers to capture their highly-prized market share,
setting off rounds of mergers, acquisitions, and other trades profiting behind-the-scenes boards,
management companies, and other finance groups.
Athena saw no room for her or other “legacy operators” in this formal market; the processes
by which cannabis was further commodifying would mean having to once again find new ways
to operate one step ahead of the law, still ready to be on the move and restart elsewhere or in new
iterations. Utilizing 501(c)(3) non-profit status designation as protection from enforcement, she
and others birthed a new model where cannabis is distributed, shared and consumed together at
times as part of a religious practice, which she in part links to Black Rastafarian traditions but
also to other ways of being. She invited me:
“What the churches have and what you see – and I invite you. Come, on a Sunday,
okay? It is the most magical thing to see. Everybody's giggling and laughing. Your mind is
the most powerful thing they can choke. Part of the thing, part of what’s so magical is we
don't talk to each other. People don't talk to each other. Sincerely from the soul. People
always put on a façade… with Reefer Madness, they made you the outcast, okay?...And
that’s okay. You have to be the outlaw and then the rest of the world looks and views you as
that way. It's that Robin Hood effect, you know?”

Once in that Robin Hood position, she explained, you suddenly find yourself “in a band of
merry men,” using those resources to sustain your local communities directly (including funding
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schools directly, as noted prior), you create mutual aid for patients, you are “stealing from the
rich to give to the poor” by refusing to give your surplus wages to federal taxes that are in turn
used to police you, or from attaching yourself to corporate investors and landlords. Athena
enshrined a politics of cannabis that, like Jerome’s economy of t-shirt shop cannabis (and now
hemp products) meant to protect communities, required fugitivity to work.
Athena’s unwillingness to assent to the legal market and Jerome’s critique of settler-
colonialism in Chapter 6 speaks to the intersecting elements of fugitivity and refusal that merit
more attention – the kinds scholar Audra Simpson explain regarding indigenous communities’
persistent ”alternative structures of thought, politics and traditions away from and in critical
relationship to states” – when considering what it means to dismantle racial capitalism (2017:19;
Sojoyner 2017). Refusal, repair, fugitivity – overlayed on geographies of the plot, of maroonage,
of the elusive – are not the kind of practices that a policy can easily “fix” or manage, especially
since the point is rarely to be governed by a power structure that has its roots in enslavement and
colonial dispossession. Even while Athena signals redistribution, this is far from the kind of
structured, government-managed solutions that have been part of socialist critique, or
progressive solutions in the US. Black, indigenous and queer geographies that attend to the
expansive nature and layered histories of the plantation, of settler-colonialism and of queer/trans
politics of mutual aid help make sense of the distinct, yet overlapping perspectives of Black
edible manufactures like Athena, Dené and Chickasaw scientists like Dr. Hope, lesbian radical
Latinxs like Selena, or even rural-transplanted “practical anarchists” like Susan on the limits of
the state and regulated market in containing the possibilities in cannabis as a livelihood, as a
plant, as a means of survival and alternative wealth.
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Even more interesting were the ways actors like Dr. Hope or Athena embraced the
ambiguity of cannabis altogether, the willingness to accept those who did not directly align with
this vision and to define their political position broadly. In their eyes, the possibilities they
sought to enact could co-exist with those scrambling for a foothold in the ethnic entrepreneurial
economy, with the laid-back canna-bros from the South Bay, with the Green Triangle back-to-
landers - with a host of other misfits and refugees of mainstream racial capitalism. What they
espoused a passion for the flower, for its science and some room for care. They believed
cannabis had room for a more spacious politics, and they saw their everyday economic
exchanges as the place to test out this politics. In Athena’s words, “It’s gonna take a huge
community, a network of people, and that’s why networking in the cannabis industry is so
important. We are not enemies, we are not adversaries, you know?” Granted, this was not not-
capitalism; it still involved market exchange, profit, real estate and deals. But it also allowed a
multiplicity of new relationships to grow, even among the unlikely allies, and may have made
facilitated a regulation system that attempted to integrate progressive elements, from
comprehensive labor protections to free medicine to a complex attempt at social equity.
The multi-faceted, ever-changing fugitive project also, I sought to demonstrate, radically
increased the value generated in the industry. The sometimes-political, sometimes-ambiguous,
and often-still cash fueled relations cemented unexpectedly (or perhaps, very expectedly)
mechanisms contributing to place-based growth described by economic geographers. These
actors build a regional economy through tight networks that required trust, where shared
expertise flowed to producers, where innovative technologies proliferated, and where traded and
untraded dependencies – a dependence produced by precarity and policing – that translated to
economic expansion. Their decision to do so, of course, were predicated on the broader context
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of economic restructuring and the violent waves of creative destruction generated in Los
Angeles’ racial capitalist economy.
Cannabis in Los Angele opens the door to questions about the true nature of value in the
economy, and where, beyond the fog of stock valuations and real estate markets, real wealth lies.
The answer, this dissertation has sought to argue, is it was somewhere much closer to the ground,
and far more expansive than material profit. Fugitive circuits of value thrived off of deep
relations of care and compassion by workers and communities affected by layers of racialized
violence and trauma. Cultivators fostered curious and complex relationships with the plant to
support an expansive repertoire that of yet, no biotech could touch and belonging to a diverse
and person-to-person network of seed exchange. The list goes on (and the Chapters went on), but
actors understood value through a broader lens that included individual and collective
experiential benefit and social transformation. The successive processes of commodification not
only obscured, but also undermined such value-generation, fostering divides and ruthless
competition, amplifying racialized inequalities and constructed divisions among communities,
and pulling focus to immediate material gain modeled from other industries dominating LA.
While this economy was radically Angeleno and value produced in relationship to many
local factors, these were are also affected by a plethora of state, national and even global factors
tied to Black, Latinx and other indigenous diasporas, to imperialism and militarization, and to
other transnational flows (including of fugitive seeds and shoots). This is critical to both
challenging a settler-colonial frame that views these markets (and nature) as bordered, a-
historical and self-contained engines of value but also suggest a need for new analytics of racial
capitalism and fugitivity that extends beyond the US context. Globally, cannabis economies are
changing rapidly, and it will be important to understand how industry actors in Los Angeles and
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other sites not only respond, but affect translocal processes. Though cannabis’s fugitive circuits
of value have always challenged national borders– just think of the plant’s development through
landraces from Afghanistan to Mexico. The commodification process is also globalizing, as new
hubs of production in Columbia, Lebanon, and other sites are coaxed to come “on line” (these
days, often at the behest and guidance of corporate consultants like McKinsey). Others I spoke to
have discussed how to utilize Mexico’s looming legalizing to create transborder projects to share
medical knowledge – and still others to off-load US manufacturing costs in the most neoliberal
ways (yet, marijuana maquiladoras). An expanding hemp economy figures strongly in these
relationships, with China and India central producers, and will require new research.
But beyond a structural analysis of globalized cannabis, there is much to gain through
further studying the expansion of this il/licit market in relationship to the postcolonial lens, as I
started to do more thoroughly in Chapter 6, through scholars like Lewis (2020) and Thomas
(2016) from the Caribbean vantage point. When one starts to think of these problems outside of
the limits of US and global North politics and through the eyes of theory from the global South,
there is significant possibility in making more sense of fugitive refusal and of the persistence of
unsettling, unplanned and ungovernable economies.
A Politics of Life, A Ground for New Economic Futures
Even while a wide set of fugitive relationships fueled market growth, newer actors coming
to capitalize on cannabis have proved unable to fully comprehend what had led to rapid
expansion – in part because they approached the economy with the notion that there was
something to be fixed, that cannabis had to change its fundamental relationship to become a
legal, functioning economy (despite how much it had done just fine prior). The challenge for
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labor organizers, abolitionists and other advocates in this space was not to start from the same
premise that cannabis had to be also fixed – to become more capitalist.
Robin Kelley referred the possibilities when we attend to working-class Black politics not
just as the strike or the labor union but to how power was organized precisely by being
unorganized, or at the least not visibly so (2002). The union had to walk a very complex
tightrope between helping workers understand the benefits of unionization and not espousing
subsumption into the privatized, punitive state-regulated market as the final ends – rather a step
towards building power. The fact so much of the leadership was queer of color, I believe, helped
make them much more comfortable with these ambiguities, much more willing to imagine other
ways of being. But over time, choices had to made – for example in organizing MedMen workers
versus trying to block MedMen from the space altogether. Or, in the case of equity advocates,
was the point to stop the informal market alongside opening opportunities?
This raises many political questions, some radically relevant to a changing Los Angeles.
While significant gains have been made to transform Los Angeles through inside-outside
organizing, the fight for community reinvestment and regarding zoning politics suggests the
power of police as an unassailable policy block. Even the most progressive legislators seem
unsure how to disentangle the tentacles, from broken-windows urbanism to budget capture. The
moves towards an abolitionist frame in labor organizations like UFCW Local 770 offer hope that
those with more inside power can be vital allies, if they respond to the realities of a base that has
borne the worst of punitive violence and social abandonment. Focusing only the latter avoids
how much social programs and corporate power and gentrification hinges upon policing. But this
is no easy feat, and comes with having to face blunt violence, as Mariana and other budtenders
and even owner-operators who joined the fight to defund police in Summer 2020 learned.
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Fully addressing how policing also affects informal markets will also require tacit alliances
among organized actors and those seeking to remain unorganized, and an ability to nuance
regulation meant to protect in ways that center the voices of those who make these markets work.
These echo with other struggles in sectors that have operated at the edges of the economy in this
fashion: Street vending, sex work, child care, night-life, and multiple sites that are circuits of
both survival and mutuality (Chambers-Letson 2018; Munoz 2016; Valles 2015a, 2015b). These
sectors often are everyday ways people provide care in the shadow of criminalization, mitigating
the everyday extending power of policing in the everyday through their care and compassion,
while tangibly adding to the world with meaning, joy, learning, pleasure and more. What
tensions emerge in these spaces between the need to provide regulation, safety, security versus
opening room for self-determination? What can be gained by keeping the dialogues spacious and
imaginative to how to change the nature of economic life, especially in a context where so many
have experienced only violence from the state yet where precarity and fugitivity often put
workers at tremendous risk?
In related fashion, thinking about how much value was accrued through workers’ not only
material and physical exertion, but the kinds of aesthetic, creative and care energies they poured
in help rethink contemporary debates on the future of work. Much discussion among
philanthropic groups, mainstream liberal economists and even some progressive and labor
groups on questions like automation, or gig work, tend to focus on regulating such labor, and
making it possible for people to gain a steady income and health care. There is also often
confusion as to why workers tied to apps like Lyft and Uber, for example, would agree or see
themselves represented in the barrage of propaganda on questions like “flexibility” and why
some surveys show that indeed, people do value this in a workplace. Yet hearing of how so many
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came to the cannabis industry from low-wage retail or from other intensive labor filled with
harassment and dehumanization reminds me of just how many jobs out there are not how most
people would actually like to spend their time. This relates to other forms of racial capitalist
violence: part of what helped people find value in cannabis is the fact that they were also
survivors of violence, of incarceration, of inequality, and found healing.
Coming from a privileged position as an academic now, where I have finally been able to
move away from some of the most physically painful and mind-numbing jobs I have had (filling
seeds in a warehouse, for example) or from temp job after temp job of dead-inside-clerical work,
I am reminded daily of what happens when people have the opportunity to do something they are
passionate about, that brings them the value that matters to them and allows them to confront
their own lived experiences and loss. (I am also reminded of my own time, pre-research, working
in the legacy market.) This dissertation underscores a pressing concern with how at times, in
liberal policy-making, planning, philanthropic think tanks or even some institutional labor
activism, some are willing to trade away other peoples’ opportunities to do work that means
something more to them. (We can see corporations attempting to wave at this through hollow
self-care policies, or the “gamification” of work, promoted by Amazon and other corporations.) I
also saw just how many people wanted to make quick money – who were willing to play into a
more immediate politics of wealth creation by selling their license – to get out of the painful
grind of racialized and gendered labor, or to set their mothers, grandmothers up to do the same.
There is plenty to critique about neoliberal entrepreneurialism and its false promises, and yes,
desires is constructed by material circumstances, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the
sentiments expressed by cannabis cultivators, budtenders, and more that many jobs in the
“mainstream” economy are deadening at a human level.
295
How much have we been willing to shortchange our definitions of “good jobs,” and narrow
them to a smaller, more restricted version of reality (and no, this does not mean just giving
exchanging low-wage retail jobs for coding)? This does not mean accepting the vaunted
blessings of an app to offer flexibility, but in fact, quite the opposite: the desire for such part-
time-ness suggests few would willingly spend their time picking up other people’s groceries,
driving them around, or having to do the tasks that they did not want to. Cannabis hints (in
completely imperfect, rough approximations) at the possibility when jobs suck less, and offer an
opportunity to fulfill more complete human needs. What happens when we put life at the center
of our conversations on work, on the economy, on entrepreneurship? How can life-work be
recentered onto real human needs, competition re-oriented to generating deeper value?
Remembering, Repairing, Renewing
As I finish writing this part of the story, in and beyond LA, young people in the cannabis
space and interrelated labor and abolition movements are pushing new life-affirming economic
horizons that speak to care, compassion and collectivity. Many of these challenge the narrow
scope of repair and reparations and push a politics of possibility, of relief and value creation.
Selena invited me to present at the January 2020 Queer Creating Change Conference, as part
of a panel on cannabis equity. In the same room, the original UFCW organizer, Elisa, who first
brought me on was there, and I saw her tear up when she saw us presenting the transformations
in LA to a packed room of mostly young queer people of color from around the US. Participants
shared later in conversation the gardens they were making in rural Arkansas, their struggles to
unionize dispensaries in Boston, or their hopes to learn how a better relationship with cannabis as
medicine in Chicago. Stories of family loss interweaved with living with HIV/AIDS, stigma
around cannabis, police encounters, parties, ballroom scene experiences and smoke sessions.
296
Sitting there with Elisa and Selena was a full circle kind of moment; I realized that despite the
tide of commercialization that had left so many either excluded from or experiencing new
exploitation via cannabis, a new generation raised through multiple crises were ready to dream
with freedom in mind.
In the COVID-19 crisis, young workers in Massachusetts have seized upon the slowdown in
the economy, and the abandonment it has spurring by impatient wealthier white owners opened
the space to take over several dispensaries and turn them into cooperatives. These same young
people also have fought for the first official social equity grants and debt forgiveness at the state
level, a fight still ongoing at this time. In California, patients and workers once again organized
to retain free medicine programs in dispensaries and then brought dozens of dispensaries to
commit to implementing this. More than forty dispensaries and numerous cultivators have
unionized in Los Angeles, and in Oregon, a new wave of organizing under Cannabis Workers
Rising is growing. Bay Area labor groups launched a new apprenticeship with the community
college system, and a similar labor-industry program is expanding in Long Beach. New
collectives have emerged in San Jose, Los Angeles, Oakland, and other sites espousing a mutli-
racial politics, centering indigenous and Black voices, and creating new narratives, from
budtender-training-zines to efforts to push beyond social media rhetoric on Black Lives Matter to
advance a broader politics of abolition within cannabis community reinvestment. The kinds of
scientific needs Dr. Hope identified, studying components like THC-A, CBD-G and the whole
plant are gaining legitimacy and even academic backing.
These moments suggest overlapping efforts to stop the full-scale evisceration of cannabis
into hollowed-out accumulation and remind the ways movements and collective action can be
part of expanding value beyond profit and production alone. While the chances of small
297
entrepreneurial ownership of cannabis grow more challenging in Los Angeles’ nexus of real
estate, police and now tech power, other forms of value persist, including the ability to give front
line workers a voice and to retain other relationships to the plant and people. Such can only
mutually benefit if brought into conversation with other BIPOC women and queer and trans-led
labor, cooperative, and small business movements from the global South to the US South.
Athena’s offers a key grounding principle for moving forward: the more divides that arise,
the more remembering, repairing and re-imaging through critical education becomes. She shared:
I teach people, and I ask them to remember. Nobody should forget, nobody should forget
who we lost. I tell them, look at those pictures on the wall [pointing to a photos of cannabis
patients and farmers]: remember who you are. We have to remind each other we are fighting a
war, and that war is not against our brothers and cousins and sisters who are running these shops.
Our war is against the system. It's against the pharma; it's against the few select people that hold
all their money offshore in islands; the people who own the banking systems and put people into
debt... And how do you control a country? You let them believe their neighbor is the problem.

This dissertation has sought to help remember and remind, based on the stories and
generosity of so many who sought to survive and thrive the ruins of dispossession – a messy,
complex story much loss, yet also which has transformed the poisons of death-dealing racial
capitalism, of greed and inequity, into medicine. Theirs are histories ingrained in the Los
Angeles landscape and the multiplicity of strains imagined over generations, some holding
legacies across the Atlantic; others tied to US imperial geographies; and still more on the paths
of migrants and fugitives. The question is, amidst the cycles of crisis, how do we plant the next
seeds of change and sustain the shoots of transformation? And as we learn, can we be more
deliberate, more democratic, and more daring in what we collectively cultivate?

298
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Appendix

The following sample reports are linked for reference, both to share how some of the findings of
this long-term research were utilized in practice and policy, and to further explain some of the
policies and debates detailed in this dissertation. The reports are also included to recognize the
kind of collective efforts and participant, collaborative research that undergirded this
dissertation, and to which I am indebted.

Chlala, Robert (March 2019). Repairing the Harms, Re-imaging the Future: Centering Cannabis
Social & Health Equity in Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Social Impact Center.

Chlala, Robert (May 2020). Cannabis Social Responsibility: A Snapshot of LA’s Growing
Efforts. Social Impact Center.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract By the eve of the legal opening of California’s recreational cannabis industry in 2018, Los Angeles (Tonga lands) emerged as the largest retail cannabis and indoor cultivation sectors in the US. What accounts for this radical regional expansion, and how did political and regulatory shifts transform the market? Through an immersive, five-year ethnography, including more than 75 in-depth interviews, this dissertation turns a feminist, Black radical and regional geographic lens on how cannabis workers, owner-operators, and patients generated multiple forms of value that dramatically expanded the scale and scope of Los Angeles medical marijuana market from 2008 to 2020. I situate the market in a plantation landscape in Los Angeles dominated by real estate speculation, policing-as-policy, fragile ethnic entrepreneurship and exploitative gendered service labor, shaped by the racialized restructuring of the Great Recession. Cannabis offered a means for front-line BIPOC, queer and trans and women actors to accrue material benefit and generate other forms of incommensurable value in the face of death-dealing loss and exclusion. In tightly-connected dispensaries, cultivation and manufacturing sites, different actors produced a fugitive nexus of care and science that deepened cannabis’ medical applications, patient-worker relations and bio-social properties. Such practices were fundamentally molded by radical queer and trans, disability rights, abolitionist and labor movements that redefined the industry to confront the devaluation of life. The expansion and legalization of the market, though, attracted real estate, entertainment, tech and venture capitalists that advanced rapid commodification, and forced tense contestations in LA’s BIPOC communities regarding the prospects for equity. Tracing cannabis’ changes helps re-orient understandings of market transformation to the grassroots workplaces where value is generated and contested. It points to the ways urban movements concerned with more generative livelihoods must grapple with complex positions of fugitivity, refusal and repair towards building deeper visions of abolition and reparations.

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